tchell  Webster 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 
CALIFORNIA 

SAN  DIEGO 


presented  to  the 

LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  •  SAN  DIEGO 
by 

FRIENDS  OF  THE  LIBRARY 


Mrs.    Edwin    Wr    Meise 


donor 


THE  REAL  ADVENTURE 


'We  can't  talk  here."  he  said.     "We  must  go  elsewhere. 


i-\ 


THE 

REAL  ADVENTURE 

A  Novel 


By 

HENRY  KITCHELL  WEBSTER 


ILLUSTRATED    BY 

R.  M.  CROSBY 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


Serial  Persian 

Copyright  1915 

THE  RIDGWAY  COMPANY 


Complete  Version 

Copyright  1916 

THE  BOBBS- MERRILL  COMPANY 


CRESS    OF 

BRAUNWORTH    &    CO. 

BOOKBINDERS    AND    PRINTERS 

BROOKLYN,    N.    Y- 


CONTENTS 


BOOK  I 

THE  GREAT   ILLUSION 

CHAPTER  PACK 

I    A  Point  of  Departure 1 

II     Beginning  an  Adventure 8 

III  Frederica's  Plan  and  What  Happened  to  It       ...  15 

IV  Rosalind  Stanton  Doesn't  Disappear 22 

V    The  Second  Encounter 29 

VI    The  Big  Horse 35 

VII    How  It  Struck  Portia _,     .     .  45 

VIII     Rodney's  Experiment 53 

IX    After  Breakfast                                                                „  58 


BOOK  II 

LOVE  AND  THE  WORLD 

I  The  Princess  Cinderella 67 

II  The  First  Question  and  an  Answer  to  It       ....  77 

III  Where  Did  Rose  Come  In         89 

IV  Long  Circuits  and  Short 94 

V  Rodney  Smiled 106 

VI  The  Damascus  Road 119 

VII  How  the  Pattern  Was  Cut 133 

VIII  A  Birthday 134 

IX  A  Defeat 148 

X  The  Door  That  Was  to  Open 162 

XI  An  Illustration        170 

XII  What  Harriet  Did 174 

XIII  Fate  Plays  a  Joke 185 

XIV  The  Dam  Gives  Way 189 

XV  The  Only  Remedy 199 

XVI  Rose  Opens  the  Door 208 


CONTENTS— Continued 
BOOK  III 

THE  WORLD  ALONE 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I    The  Length  of  a  Thousand  Yards 217 

II    The  Evening  and  the  Morning  Were  the  First  Day     .  232 

III  Rose  Keeps  the  Path 248 

IV  The  Girl  With  the  Bad  Voice 259 

V    Mrs.  Goldsmith's  Taste 274 

VI    A  Business  Proposition 283 

VII    The  End  of  a  Fixed  Idea 298 

VIII     Success — and  a  Recognition 311 

IX    The  Man  and  the  Director 331 

X    The  Voice  of  the  World 343 

XI    The  Short  Circuit  Again 352 

XII    "I'm  All  Alone" 369 

XIII  Frederica's  Paradox 375 

XIV  The  Miry  Way 385 

XV    In  Flight 399 

XVI    Anti-Climax        415 

XVII    The  End  of  the  Tour 430 

XVIII    The  Conquest  of  Centropolis 438 


BOOK  IV 

THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

I    The  Tune  Changes 463 

II    A  Broken  Parallel 484 

III  Friends 504 

IV  Couleur-de-rose 533 

V    The  Beginning 554 


THE  REAL  ADVENTURE 


BOOK  ONE 

The  Great  Illusion 


THE 
REAL  ADVENTURE 


CHAPTEE  I 

A   POINT   OF  DEPASTURE 

"INDEED,"  continued  the  professor,  glancing  demurely 
down  at  his  notes,  "if  one  were  the  editor  of  a  column  of 
— er  advice  to  young  girls,  such  as  I  believe  is  to  be  found, 
along  with  the  household  hints  and  the  dress  patterns,  on  the 
ladies'  page  of  most  of  our  newspapers — if  one  were  the  editor 
of  such  a  column,  he  might  crystallize  the  remarks  I  have  been 
making  this  morning  into  a  warning — never  marry  a  man 
with  a  passion  for  principles." 

It  drew  a  laugh,  of  course.  Professorial  jokes  never  miss 
fire.  But  the  girl  didn't  laugh.  She  came  to  with  a  start — 
she  had  been  staring  out  the  window — and  wrote,  apparently, 
the  fool  thing  down  in  her  note-book.  It  was  the  only  note 
she  had  made  in  thirty-five  minutes. 

All  of  his  brilliant  exposition  of  the  paradox  of  Eousseau 
and  Eobespierre  (he  was  giving  a  course  on  the  French  Eevo- 
lution),  the  strange  and  yet  inevitable  fact  that  the  softest, 
most  sentimental,  rose-scented  religion  ever  invented,  should 
have  produced,  through  its  most  thoroughly  infatuated  disci 
ple,  the  ghastliest  reign  of  terror  that  ever  shocked  the  world ; 
his  masterly  character  study  of  the  "sea-green  incorruptible," 
too  humane  to  swat  a  fly,  yet  capable  of  sending  half  of  France 
to  the  guillotine  in  order  that  the  half  that  was  left  might  be 
lieve  unanimously  in  the  rights  of  man ;  all  this  the  girl  had 
let  go  by  unheard,  in  favor,  apparently,  of  the  drone  of  a  street 

1 


2  THE   REAL  ADVENTURE 

piano,  which  came  in  through  the  open  window  on  the  pre 
maturely  warm  March  wind.  Of  all  his  philosophizing, 
there  was  not  a  pen-track  to  mar  the  virginity  of  the  page 
she  had  opened  her  note-book  to  when  the  lecture  began. 

And  then,  with  a  perfectly  serious  face,  she  had  written 
down  his  silly  little  joke  about  advice  to  young  girls. 

There  was  no  reason  in  the  world  why  she  should  be  The 
Girl.  There  were  fifteen  or  twenty  of  them  in  the  class  along 
with  about  as  many  men.  And,  partly  because  there  was  no 
reason  for  his  paying  any  special  attention  to  her,  it  annoyed 
him  frightfully  that  he  did. 

She  was  good-looking,  of  course — a  rather  boyishly  splendid 
young  creature  of  somewhere  about  twenty,  with  a  heap  of 
hair  that  had,  in  spite  of  its  rather  commonplace  chestnut 
color,  a  sort  of  electric  vitality  about  it.  She  was  slightly 
prognathous,  which  gave  a  humorous  lift  to  her  otherwise 
sensible  nose.  She  had  good  straight-looking,  expressive  eyes, 
too,  and  a  big,  wide,  really  beautiful  mouth,  with  square  white 
teeth  in  it,  which,  when  she  smiled  or  yawned — and  she 
yawned  more  luxuriously  than  any  girl  who  had  ever  sat  in 
his  classes — exerted  a  sort  of  hypnotic  effect  on  him.  All 
that,  however,  left  unexplained  the  quality  she  had  of  making 
you,  whatever  she  did,  irresistibly  aware  of  her.  And,  con 
versely,  unaware  of  every  one  else  about  her.  A  bit  of  campus 
slang  occurred  to  him  as  quite  literally  applicable  to  her. 
She  had  all  the  rest  of  them  faded. 

It  wasn't,  apparently,  an  effect  she  tried  for.  He  had  to 
acquit  her  of  that.  Not  even,  perhaps,  one  that  she  was  con 
scious  of.  When  she  came  early  to  one  of  his  lectures — it 
didn't  happen  often — the  men  showed  a  practical  unanimity 
in  trying  to  choose  seats  near  by,  or  at  least  where  they  could 
see  her.  But  while  this  didn't  distress  her  at  all — they  were 
welcome  to  look  if  they  liked — she  struck  no  attitudes  for 
their  benefit.  A  sort  of  breezy  indifference — he  selected  that 
phrase  finally  as  the  best  description  of  her  attitude  toward 
all  of  them,  including  himself.  When  she  was  late,  as  Bhe 
usually  was,  she  slid  unostentatiously  into  the  back  row — 
if  possible  at  the  end  where  she  could  look  out  the  window. 


A   POINT    OF   DEPARTURE  3 

But  for  three  minutes  after  she  had  come  in,  he  knew  he  might 
as  well  have  stopped  his  lecture  and  begun  reciting  the  Greek 
alphabet.  She  was,  in  the  professor's  mind,  the  final  argu 
ment  against  coeducation.  Her  name  was  Eosalind  Stanton, 
but  his  impression  was  that  they  called  her  Rose. 

The  bell  rang  out  in  the  corridor.  He  dismissed  the  class 
and  began  stacking  up  his  notes.  Then : 

"Miss  Stanton,"  he  said. 

She  detached  herself  from  the  stream  that  was  moving  to 
ward  the  door,  and  with  a  good-humored  look  of  inquiry  about 
her  very  expressive  eyebrows,  came  toward  him.  And  then 
he  wished  he  hadn't  called  her.  She  had  spoiled  his  lecture 
— a  perfectly  good  lecture — and  his  impulse  had  been  to  re 
monstrate  with  her.  But  the  moment  he  saw  her  coming,  he 
knew  he  wasn't  going  to  be  able  to  do  it.  It  wasn't  her  fault 
that  her  teeth  had  hypnotized  him,  and  her  hair  tangled  his 
ideas. 

"This  is  an  idiotic  question,"  he  said,  as  she  paused  before 
his  desk,  "but  did  you  get  anything  at  all  out  of  my  lecture 
except  my  bit  of  facetious  advice  to  young  girls  about  to 
marry  ?" 

She  flushed  a  little  (a  girl  like  that  hadn't  any  right  to 
flush;  it  ought  to  be  against  the  college  regulations),  drew 
her  brows  together  in  a  puzzled  sort  of  way,  and  then,  with 
her  wide,  boyish,  good-humored  mouth,  she  smiled. 

"I  didn't  know  it  was  facetious,"  she  said.  "It  struck  me 
as  pretty  good.  But — I'm  awfully  sorry  if  you  thought  me  in 
attentive.  You  see,  mother  brought  us  all  up  on  the  Social 
Contract  and  The  Age  of  Reason,  things  like  that,  and  I 
didn't  put  it  down  because  .  .  ." 

"I  see,"  he  said.    "I  beg  your  pardon." 

She  smiled,  cheerfully  begged  his  and  assured  him  she'd 
try  to  do  better. 

Another  girl  who'd  been  waiting  to  speak  to  the  professor, 
perceiving  that  their  conversation  was  at  an  end,  came  and 
stood  beside  her  at  the  desk — a  scrawny  girl  with  an  eager 
voice,  and  a  question  she  wanted  to  ask  about  Robespierre; 
and  for  some  reason  or  other,  Rosalind  Stanton's  valedictory 


4         THE  EEAL  ADVENTURE 

smile  seemed  to  include  a  consciousness  of  this  other  girl — a 
consciousness  of  a  contrast.  It  might  not  have  been  any  more 
than  that,  but  somehow,  it  left  the  professor  feeling  that  he 
had  given  himself  away. 

He  was  particularly  polite  to  the  other  girl,  because  his  im 
pulse  was  to  act  so  very  differently. 

There  is  nothing  cloistral  about  the  University  of  Chicago 
except  its  architecture.  The  presence  of  a  fat  abbot,  or  a  lady 
prioress  in  the  corridor  outside  the  recitation  room  would 
have  fitted  in  admirably  with  the  look  of  the  warm  gray  walls 
and  the  carven  pointed  arches  of  the  window  and  door  case 
ments,  the  blackened  oak  of  the  doors  themselves. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  appearance  of  the  person  whom 
Rose  found  waiting  for  her  out  there,  afforded  the  piquant 
effect  of  contrast.  Or  would  have  done  so,  had  the  spectacle 
of  him  in  that  very  occupation  not  been  so  familiar. 

He  was  a  varsity  half-back,  a  gigantic  blond  young  man  in 
a  blue  serge  suit.  He  said,  "Hello,  Rose,"  and  she  said, 
"Hello,  Harry."  And  he  heaved  himself  erect  from  the  wall 
he  had  been  leaning  against  and  reached  out  an  immense 
hand  to  absorb  the  little  stack  of  note-books  she  carried.  She 
ignored  the  gesture,  and  when  he  asked  for  them  said  she'd 
carry  them  herself.  There  was  a  sort  of  strategic  advantage 
in  having  your  own  note-books  under  your  own  arm — a  fact 
which  no  one  appreciated  better  than  the  half-back  himself. 

He  looked  a  little  hurt.    "Sore  about  something  ?"  he  asked. 

She  smiled  widely  and  said,  "Not  a  bit." 

"I  didn't  mean  at  me  necessarily,"  he  explained,  and  re 
ferred  to  the  fact  that  the  professor  had  detained  her  after  he 
had  dismissed  the  class.  "What'd  he  try  to  do — call  you 
down?" 

There  was  indignation  in  the  young  man's  voice — a  hint  of 
the  protector  aroused — of  possible  retribution. 

She  grinned  again.  "Oh,  you  needn't  go  back  and  kill 
him,"  she  said. 

He  blushed  to  the  ears.  "I'm  sorry,"  he  observed  stiltedly, 
"if  I  appear  ridiculous."  But  she  went  on  smiling. 

"Don't  you  care/'  she  said.     "Everybody's  ridiculous  in 


A   POINT    OF    DEPARTURE  5 

March.  You're  ridiculous,  I'm  ridiculous,  he" — she  nodded 
along  the  corridor — "he's  plumb  ridiculous." 

He  wasn't  wholly  appeased.  It  was  rather  with  an  air  of 
resignation  that  he  held  the  door  for  her  to  go  out  by.  They 
strolled  along  in  silence  until  they  rounded  the  corner  of  the 
building.  Here,  ceremoniously,  he  fell  back,  walked  around 
behind  her  and  came  up  on  the  outside.  She  glanced  up  and 
asked  him,  incomprehensibly,  to  walk  on  the  other  side,  the 
way  they  had  been.  He  wanted  to  know  why.  This  was  where 
he  belonged. 

"You  don't  belong  there,"  she  told  him,  "if  I  want  you  the 
other  way.  And  I  do." 

He  heaved  a  sigh,  and  said  "Women!"  under  his  breath. 
Muiabile  semper!  No  matter  how  much  you  knew  about 
them,  they  remained  incomprehensible.  Their  whims  passed 
explanation.  He  was  getting  downright  sulky. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  did  her  an  injustice.  There  was  a 
valid  reason  for  her  wanting  him  to  walk  on  the  other  side. 
What  gave  the  appearance  of  pure  caprice  to  her  request  was 
just  her  womanly  dislike  of  hurting  his  feelings.  There  was 
a  small  boil  on  the  left  side  of  his  neck  and  when  he  walked 
at  her  left  hand,  it  didn't  show. 

"Oh,  don't  be  fussy,"  she  said.    "It's  such  a  dandy  day." 

But  the  half-back  refused  to  be  comforted.  And  he  was  right 
about  that.  A  woman  never  tells  you  to  cheer  up  in  that 
brisk  unfeeling  way  if  she  really  cares  a  cotton  hat  about  your 
troubles.  And  a  candid  deliberate  self-examination  would 
have  convinced  Rose  that  she  didn't,  in  spite  of  the  sentimen 
tally  warm  March  wind  that  was  blowing  her  hair  about.  She 
was  less  moved  by  the  half-back's  sorrows  this  morning  than  at 
any  time  during  the  last  six  months.  She'd  hardly  have 
minded  the  boil  before  to-day. 

Six  months  ago,  he  had  been  a  very  wonderful  person  to 
her.  There  had  been  a  succession  of  pleasant — of  really  thrill 
ing  discoveries.  First,  that  he'd  rather  dance  with  her  than 
with  any  other  girl  in  the  university.  (You're  not  to  forget 
that  he  was  a  celebrity.  During  the  football  season,  his  name 
was  on  the  sporting  page  of  the  Chicago  papers  every  day — 


6  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

generally  in  the  head-lines  when  there  was  a  game  to  write 
about,  and  Walter  Camp  had  devoted  a  whole  paragraph  to 
explaining  why  he  didn't  put  him  on  the  first  ail-American 
eleven  but  on  the  second  instead — a  gross  injustice  which  she 
had  bitterly  resented.) 

There  was  a  thrill,  then,  in  the  discovery  that  he  liked  her 
better  than  other  girls,  and  a  greater  thrill  in  the  subsequent 
discovery  that  she  had  become  the  basis  of  his  whole  orienta 
tion.  It  was  her  occupations  that  left  him  leisure  for  his 
own ;  his  leisure  was  hers  to  dispose  of  as  she  liked ;  his  energy, 
including  his  really  prodigious  physical  prowess,  to  be  di 
rected  toward  any  object  she  thought  laudable.  Six  months 
ago  she  would  not  have  laughed — not  in  that  derisive  way 
at  least — at  the  notion  of  his  going  back  and  beating  up  the 
professor. 

There  had  been  a  thrill,  too,  in  their  more  sentimental 
passages.  But  at  this  point,  there  developed  a  most  perplex 
ing  phenomenon.  The  idea  that  he  wanted  to  make  love  to 
her,  really  moved  and  excited  her ;  set  her  imagination  to  ex 
ploring  all  sorts  of  roseate  mysteries.  The  first  time  he  had 
ever  held  her  hand — it  was  inside  her  muff,  one  icy  December 
day  when  he  hadn't  any  gloves  on — the  memory  of  the  feel  of 
that  big  hand,  and  of  the  timbre  of  his  voice,  left  her  starry- 
eyed  with  a  new  wonder.  She  dreamed  of  other  caresses;  of 
wonderful  things  that  he  should  say  to  her  and  she  should  say 
to  him. 

But  here  arose  the  perplexity.  It  was  her  imagination  of 
the  thing  that  she  enjoyed  rather  than  the  thing  itself.  The 
wonderful  scenes  that  her  own  mind  projected  never  came 
true.  The  ones  that  happened  were  disappointing — irritating, 
and  eventually  and  unescapably,  downright  disagreeable  to 
her.  There  was  no  getting  away  from  it,  the  ideal  lover  of  her 
dreams,  whose  tenderness  and  chivalry  and  devotion  were  so 
highly  desirable,  although  he  might  wear  the  half-back's 
clothes  and  bear  his  face  and  name,  was  not  the  half-back. 
She  might  dote  on  his  absence,  but  his  presence  was  another 
matter. 

The  realization  of  this  fact  had  been  gradual.    She  wasn't 


A   POINT    OF   DEPARTURE  7 

fully  conscious  of  it,  even  on  this  March  morning.  But  some 
thing  had  happened  this  morning  that  made  a  difference.  If 
she'd  been  ascending  an  imperceptible  gradient  for  the  last 
three  months,  to-day  she  had  come  to  a  recognizable  step  up 
and  taken  it.  Oddly  enough,  the  thing  had  happened  back 
there  in  the  class-room  as  she  stood  before  the  professor's 
desk  and  caught  his  eye  wavering  between  herself  and  the 
scrawny  girl  who  wanted  to  ask  a  question  about  Robespierre. 
There  had  been  more  than  blank  helpless  exasperation  in  that 
look  of  his,  and  it  had  taught  her  something.  She  couldn't 
have  explained  what. 

To  the  half-back  she  attributed  it  to  the  month  of  March. 
"You're  ridiculous,  I'm  ridiculous,  he's  ridiculous."  That  was 
about  as  well  as  she  could  put  it. 

She  and  the  half-back  had  walked  about  a  hundred  yards  in 
silence.  Now  they  were  arriving  at  a  point  where  the  path 
forked. 

"You're  elegant  company  this  morning,  I  must  say,"  he 
commented  resentfully. 

Again  she  smiled.  "I'm  elegant  company  for  myself,"  she 
said,  and  held  out  her  hand.  "Which  way  do  you  go?"  she 
asked. 

A  minute  later  she  was  swinging  along  alone,  her  shoulders 
back,  confronting  the  warm  March  wind,  drawing  into  her 
good  deep  chest,  long  breaths.  She  had  just  had,  psychically 
speaking,  a  birthday. 

She  played  a  wonderful  game  of  basket-ball  that  afternoon. 


CHAPTEE  II 


IT  was  after  five  o'clock  when,  at  the  conclusion  of  the  game 
and  a  cold  shower,  a  rub  and  a  somewhat  casual  resumption 
of  her  clothes,  she  emerged  from  the  gymnasium.  High  time 
that  she  took  the  quickest  way  of  getting  home,  unless  she 
wanted  to  be  late  for  dinner. 

But  the  exhilaration  of  the  day  persisted.  She  felt  like 
doing  something  out  of  the  regular  routine.  Even  a  prelim 
inary  walk  of  a  mile  or  so  before  she  should  cross  over  and 
take  the  elevated,  would  serve  to  satisfy  her  mild  hunger  for 
adventure.  And,  really,  she  liked  to  be  a  little  late  for  dinner. 
It  was  always  pleasanter  to  come  breezing  in  after  things  had 
come  to  a  focus,  than  to  idle  about  for  half  an  hour  in  that 
no-man's-land  of  the  day,  when  the  imminence  of  dinner 
made  it  impossible  to  do  anything  but  wait  for  it. 

So,  with  her  note-books  under  her  arm  and  her  sweater- 
jacket  unfastened,  at  a  good  four-mile  swing,  she  started 
north.  In  the  purlieus  of  the  university  she  was  frequently 
hailed  by  friends  of  her  own  sex  or  the  other.  But  though 
she  waved  cheerful  responses  to  their  greetings,  she  made  her 
stride  purposeful  enough  to  discourage  offers  of  company. 
They  all  seemed  young  to  her  to-day.  All  her  student  ac 
tivities  seemed  young.  As  if,  somehow,  she  had  outgrown 
them.  The  feeling  was  none  the  less  real  after  she  had  laughed 
at  herself  for  entertaining  it. 

She  noticed  presently  that  it  was  a  good  deal  darker  than  it 
had  any  right  to  be  at  this  hour,  and  the  sudden  fall  of  the 
breeze  and  a  persistent  shimmer  of  lightning  supplied  her 
with  the  explanation.  When  she  reached  Forty-seventh  Street, 
the  break  of  the  storm  was  obviously  a  matter  of  minutes,  so 
she  decided  to  ride  across  to  the  elevated — it  was  another  mile, 
perhaps — rather  than  walk  across  as  she  had  meant  to  do.  She 

8 


BEGINNING   AN   ADVENTURE  9 

didn't  in  the  least  mind  getting  wet,  providing  she  could  keep 
on  moving  until  she  could  change  her  clothes.  But  a  ten- 
mile  ride  in  the  elevated,  with  water  squashing  around  in 
her  boots  and  dripping  out  of  her  hair,  wasn't  an  alluring 
prospect. 

She  found  quite  a  group  of  people  waiting  on  the  corner 
for  a  car,  and  the  car  itself,  when  it  came  along,  was  crowded. 
So  she  handed  her  nickel  to  the  conductor  over  somebody's 
shoulder,  and  moved  back  to  the  corner  of  the  vestibule.  It 
was  frightfully  stuffy  inside  and  most  of  the  newly  received 
passengers  seemed  to  agree  with  her  that  the  platform  was  a 
pleasanter  place  to  stay;  which  did  very  well  until  the  next 
stop,  where  half  a  dozen  more  prospective  passengers  were 
waiting.  They  were  in  a  hurry,  too,  since  it  had  begun  in 
very  downright  fashion  to  rain. 

The  conductor  had  been  chanting,  "Up  in  the  car,  please," 
in  a  perfunctory  cry  all  along.  But  at  this  crisis,  his  voice 
got  a  new  urgency.  "Come  on,  now,"  he  proclaimed,  "you'll 
have  to  get  inside!" 

From  the  step  the  new  arrivals  pushed,  the  conductor 
pushed,  and  finally  he  was  able  to  give  the  signal  for  starting 
the  car.  The  obvious  necessity  of  making  room  for  those 
who'd  be  waiting  at  the  next  corner,  kept  him  at  the  task  of 
herding  them  inside  and  the  sheep-like  docility  of  an  Ameri 
can  crowd  helped  him. 

Regretfully,  with  the  rest,  Rose  made  her  way  to  the  door. 

"Fare,  please,"  he  said  sharply  as  she  came  along. 

She  told  him  she  had  paid  her  fare,  but  for  some  reason, 
perhaps  because  he  was  tired  at  the  end  of  a  long  run,  perhaps 
because  he  saw  some  one  else  he  suspected  of  being  a  spotter, 
he  elected  not  to  believe  her. 

"When  did  you  pay  it?"  he  demanded. 

"A  block  back,"  she  said,  "when  all  those  other  people 
got  on." 

"You  didn't  pay  it  to  me,"  he  said  truculently.  "Come 
along !  Pay  your  fare  or  get  off  the  car." 

"I  paid  it  once,"  she  said  quietly,  "and  I'm  not  going  to  pay 
it  again."  With  that  she  started  forward  toward  the  door. 


10  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

He  reached  out  across  his  little  rail  and  caught  her  by  the 
arm.  It  was  a  natural  act  enough — not  polite,  to  be  sure,  by 
no  means  chivalrous.  Still,  he  probably  put  into  his  grip  no 
more  strength  than  he  thought  necessary  to  prevent  her  walk 
ing  by  into  the  car. 

But  it  had  a  surprising  result — a  result  that  normally  would 
not  have  happened.  Yet,  on  this  particular  day,  it  could  not 
have  happened  differently.  It  had  been  a  red-letter  day  from 
the  beginning,  from  no  assignable  cause  an  exciting  joyous 
day,  and  the  thrill  of  the  hard  fast  game,  the  shower,  the  rub, 
the  walk,  had  brought  her  up  to  what  engineers  speak  of  as 
a  "peak." 

Well,  the  conductor  didn't  know  that.  If  he  had,  he  would 
either  have  let  the  girl  go  by,  or  have  put  a  good  deal  more 
force  into  his  attempt  to  stop  her.  And  the  first  thing  he 
knew,  he  found  both  his  wrists  pinned  in  the  grip  of  her  two 
hands;  found  himself  staring  stupidly  into  a  pair  of  great 
blazing  blue  eyes — it's  a  wrathful  color,  blue,  when  you  light 
it  up — and  listening  uncomprehendingly  to  a  voice  that  said, 
"Don't  dare  touch  me  like  that !" 

The  episode  might  have  ended  right  there,  for  the  con 
ductor's  consternation  was  complete.  If  she  could  have 
walked  straight  into  the  car,  he  would  not  have  pursued  her. 
But  her  note-books  were  scattered  everywhere  and  had  to  be 
gathered  up,  and  there  were  two  or  three  of  the  passengers 
who  thought  the  situation  was  funny,  and  laughed,  which 
did  not  improve  the  conductor's  temper. 

Rose  was  aware,  as  she  gathered  up  her  note-books,  of  an 
other  hand  that  was  helping  her — a  gloved  masculine  hand. 
She  took  the  books  it  held  out  to  her  as  she  straightened  up, 
and  said,  "Thank  you,"  but  without  looking  around  for  the 
face  that  went  with  it.  The  conductor's  intentions  were  still 
at  the  focal  point  of  her  mind.  They  were,  apparently,  un 
altered.  He  had  jerked  the  bell  while  she  was  collecting  her 
note-books  and  the  car  was  grinding  down  to  a  stop. 

"You  pay  your  fare,"  he  repeated,  "or  you  get  off  the  car 
right  here." 


BEGINNING   AN   ADVENTURE  11 

"Right  here"  was  in  the  middle  of  what  looked  like  a  lake 
and  the  rain  was  pouring  down  with  a  roar. 

She  didn't  hesitate  long,  but  before  she  could  answer  a 
voice  spoke — a  voice  which,  with  intuitive  certainty,  she  asso 
ciated  with  the  gloved  hand  that  had  helped  gather  up  her 
note-books — a  very  crisp,  finely  modulated  voice. 

"That's  perfectly  outrageous,"  it  said.  "The  young  lady 
has  paid  her  fare." 

"Did  you  see  her  pay  it  ?"  demanded  the  conductor. 

"Naturally  not,"  said  the  voice.  "I  got  on  at  the  last  cor 
ner.  She  was  here  then.  But  if  she  said  she  did,  she  did." 

It  seemed  to  relieve  the  conductor  to  have  some  one  of  his 
own  sex  to  quarrel  with.  He  delivered  a  stream  of  admonition 
somewhat  sulphurously  phrased,  to  the  general  effect  that  any 
one  whose  concern  the  present  affair  was  not,  could,  at  his 
option,  close  his  jaw  or  have  his  block  knocked  off. 

Rose  hadn't,  as  yet,  looked  round  at  her  champion.  But 
she  now  became  aware  that  inside  a  shaggy  gray  sleeve  which 
hung  beside  her,  there  was  a  sudden  tension  of  big  muscles ; 
the  gloved  hand  that  had  helped  gather  up  her  note-books, 
clenched  itself  into  a  formidable  fist.  The  thought  of  the 
sort  of  thud  that  fist  might  make  against  the  over-active  jaw 
of  the  conductor  was  pleasant.  Still,  the  thing  mustn't  be 
allowed  to  happen. 

She  spoke  quickly  and  decisively.  "I  won't  pay  another 
fare,  but  of  course  you  may  put  me  off  the  car." 

"All  right,"  said  the  conductor. 

The  girl  smiled  over  the  very  gingerly  way  in  which  he 
reached  out  for  her  elbow  to  guide  her  around  the  rail  and 
toward  the  step.  Technically,  the  action  constituted  putting 
her  off  the  car.  She  heard  the  crisp  voice  once  more,  this 
time  repeating  a  number,  "twenty-two-naught-five,"  or  some 
thing  like  that,  just  as  she  splashed  down  into  the  two-inch 
lake  that  covered  the  hollow  in  the  pavement.  The  bell  rang 
twice,  the  car  started  with  a  jerk,  there  was  another  splash, 
and  a  big  gray-clad  figure  alighted  in  the  lake  beside  her. 

"I've  got  his  number,"  the  crisp  voice  said  triumphantly. 


12  THE   REAL   ADVESTTtlKE 

"But,"  gasped  the  girl,  "but  what  in  the  world  did  you  get 
off  the  car  for?" 

It  wasn't  raining.  It  was  doing  an  imitation  of  Niagara 
Falls,  and  the  roar  of  it  almost  drowned  their  voices. 

"What  did  I  get  off  the  car  for!"  he  shouted.  "Why,  I 
wouldn't  have  missed  it  for  anything.  It  was  immense !  It's 
so  confounded  seldom,"  he  went  on,  "that  you  find  anybody 
with  backbone  enough  to  stick  up  for  a  principle.  .  .  ." 

He  heard  a  brief,  deep-throated  little  laugh  and  pulled  up 
short  with  a,  "What's  the  joke  ?" 

"I  laughed,"  she  said,  "because  you  have  been  deceived." 
And  she  added  quickly,  "I  don't  believe  it's  quite  so  deep  on 
the  sidewalk,  is  it?"  With  that  she  waded  away  toward  the 
curb. 

He  followed,  then  led  the  way  to  a  lee-wall  that  offered, 
comparatively  speaking,  shelter. 

Then,  "Where's  the  deception?"  he  asked. 

On  any  other  day,  it's  probable  she'd  have  acted  differently ; 
would  have  paid  some  heed,  though  a  bit  contemptuously, 
perhaps,  to  the  precepts  of  ladylike  behavior,  in  which  she'd 
been  admirably  grounded.  The  case  for  reticence  and  discre 
tion  was  a  strong  one.  The  night  was  dark;  the  rain-lashed 
street  deserted ;  the  man  an  utterly  casual  stranger — why,  she 
hadn't  even  had  a  straight  look  into  his  face.  His  motive  in 
getting  off  the  car  was  at  least  dubitable.  Even  if  not  sin 
ister,  it  could  easily  be  unpleasantly  gallant.  A  man  might 
not  contemplate  doing  her  bodily  harm,  and  still  be  capable 
of  trying  to  collect  some  sort  of  sentimental  reward  for  the 
ducking  he  had  submitted  himself  to. 

Her  instinct  rejected  all  that.  The  sound  of  his  voice,  the 
general — atmosphere  of  him  had  been  exactly  right.  And 
then,  he'd  left  undone  the  things  he  ought  not  to  have  done. 
He  hadn't  tried  to  take  hold  of  her  arm  as  they  had  splashed 
along  through  the  lake  to  the  curb.  He  hadn't  exhibited  any 
tenderly  chivalrous  concern  over  how  wet  she  was.  And,  to 
day  being  to-day,  she  consigned  ladylike  considerations  to  the 
inventor  of  them,  and  gave  instinct  its  head. 

She  laughed  again  as  she  answered  his  question.    "The  de- 


BEGINNING   AN   ADVENTUEE  13 

ception  was  that  I  pretended  to  do  it  from  principle.  The  real 
reason  why  I  wouldn't  pay  another  fare,  is  because  I  had  only 
one  more  nickel." 

"Good  lord !"  said  the  man. 

"And,"  she  went  on,  "that  nickel  will  pay  my  fare  home  on 
the  elevated.  It's  only  about  half  a  mile  to  the  station,  but 
from  there  home  it's  ten.  So  you  see  I'd  rather  walk  this  than 
that." 

"But  that's  dreadful,"  he  cried.  "Isn't  there  .  .  . 
Couldn't  you  let  me  .  .  ." 

"Oh,"  she  said,  "it  isn't  so  bad  as  that.  It's  just  one  of  the 
silly  things  that  happen  to  you  sometimes,  you  know.  I 
didn't  have  very  much  money  when  I  started,  it  being  Fri 
day.  And  then  I  paid  my  subscription  to  The  Maroon.  .  .  ." 
She  didn't  laugh  audibly,  but  without  seeing  her  face,  he 
knew  she  smiled,  the  quality  of  her  voice  enriching  itself  some 
how.  .  .  .  "And  I  ate  a  bigger  lunch  than  usual,  and  that 
brought  me  down  to  ten  cents.  I  could  have  got  more  of 
course  from  anybody,. but  ten  cents,  except  for  that  conductor, 
would  have  been  enough." 

"You  will  make  a  complaint  about  that,  won't  you?"  he 
urged.  "Even  if  it  wasn't  on  principle  that  you  refused  to 
pay  another  fare?  And  let  me  back  you  up  in  it.  I've  his 
number,  you  know." 

"You  deserve  that,  I  suppose,"  she  said,  "because  you  did 
get  off  the  car  on  principle.  But — well,  really,  unless  we 
could  prove  that  I  did  pay  my  fare,  by  some  other  passenger, 
you  know,  they'd  probably  think  the  conductor  did  exactly 
right.  Of  course  he  took  hold  of  me,  but  that  was  because  I 
was  going  right  by  him.  And  then,  think  what  I  did  to  him !" 

He  grumbled  that  this  was  nonsense — the  man  had  been 
guilty  at  least  of  excessive  zeal — but  he  didn't  urge  her,  any 
further,  to  complain. 

"There's  another  car  coming,"  he  now  announced,  peering 
around  the  end  of  the  wall.  "You  will  let  me  pay  your  fare 
on  it,  won't  you?" 

She  hesitated.  The  rain  was  thinning.  "I  would,"  she 
said,  "if  I  honestly  wouldn't  rather  walk,  I'm  wet  through 


14  THE   KEAL   ADVENTURE 

now,  and  it'll  be  pieasanter  to — walk  a  little  of  it  off  than  to 
squeeze  into  that  car.  Thanks,  really  very,  very  much,  though. 
Don't  you  miss  it."  She  thrust  out  her  hand.  "Good-by !" 

"I  can't  pretend  to  think  you  need  an  escort  to  the  ele 
vated,"  he  said.  "I  saw  what  you  did  to  the  conductor.  I 
haven't  the  least  doubt  you  could  have  thrown  him  off  the  car. 
But  I'd — really  like  it  very  much  if  you  would  let  me  walk 
along  with  you." 

"Why,"  she  said,  "of  course !  I'd  like  it  too.  Come  along." 


CHAPTER  III 
FREDERICA'S  PLAN  AND  WHAT  HAPPENED  TO  IT 

AT  twenty  minutes  after  seven  that  evening,  Frederica 
Whitney  was  about  as  nearly  dressed  as  she  usually  was  ten 
minutes  before  the  hour  at  which  she  had  invited  guests  to 
dinner — not  quite  near  enough  dressed  to  prevent  a  feeling 
that  she  had  to  hurry. 

Ordinarily,  though,  she  didn't  mind.  She'd  been  an  ac 
knowledged  beauty  for  ten  years  and  the  fact  had  ceased  to  be 
exciting.  She  took  it  rather  easily  for  granted,  and  knowing 
what  she  could  do  if  she  chose,  didn't  distress  herself  over 
being  lighted  up,  on  occasions,  to  something  a  good  deal  less 
than  her  full  candle-power.  To  Frederica  at  thirty — or  there 
about — the  job  of  being  a  radiantly  delightful  object  of  re 
gard  lacked  the  sporting  interest  of  uncertainty;  was  almost 
too  simple  a  matter  to  bother  about. 

But  to-night  the  tenseness  of  her  movements  and  the  faint 
trace  of  a  wire  edge  in  the  tone  in  which  she  addressed  the 
maid,  revealed  the  fact  that  she  wished  she'd  started  half  an 
hour  earlier.  Even  her  husband  discovered  it.  He  brought 
in  a  cigarette,  left  the  door  open  behind  him  and  stood 
smiling  down  at  her  with  the  peculiarly  complacent  look  that 
characterizes  a  married  man  of  forty  when  he  finds  himself 
dressed  beyond  cavil  in  the  complete  evening  harness  of  civ 
ilization,  ten  minutes  before  his  wife. 

She  shot  a  glance  of  rueful  inquiry  at  him — "Now  what 
have  you  come  fussing  around  for?"  would  be  perhaps  a  fair 
interpretation  of  it — and  asked  him  what  time  it  was,  in  the 
evident  hope  that  the  boudoir  clock  on  her  dressing-table  had 
deceived  her.  It  had,  but  in  the  wrong  direction. 

"Seven  twenty-two,  thirty-six,"  he  told  her.  It  was  a  per 
fectly  harmless  passion  he  had  for  minute  divisions  of  time, 

15. 


16  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

but  to-night  it  irritated  her.  He  might  have  spared  her  that 
thirty-six  seconds. 

She  made  no  comment  except  with  her  eyebrows,  but  he 
must  have  been  looking  at  her,  for  he  wanted  to  know,  good- 
humoredly,  what  all  the  excitement  was  about. 

"You  could  go  down  as  you  are  and  not  a  man  here  to-night 
would  know  the  difference.  And  as  for  the  women — well,  if 
they  have  something  on  you  for  once,  they'll  be  all  the  better 
pleased." 

"Don't  try  to  be  knowing  and  philosophical,  and — Havelock 
Ellish,  Martin,  dear,"  she  admonished  him,  pending  a  minute 
operation  with  an  infinitesimal  hairpin.  "It  isn't  your  lay 
a  bit.  Just  concentrate  your  mind  on  one  thing,  and  that's 
being  nice  to  Hermione  Woodruff  .  .  ." 

She  broke  off  for  a  long  stare  into  her  hand-glass;  then 
finished,  casually,  ".  .  .  and  on  seeing  that  Roddy  is." 

He  asked,  "Why  Rodney?"  in  a  tone  that  matched  hers; 
looked  at  her,  widened  his  eyes,  said  "Huh !"  to  himself  and, 
finally,  shook  his  head.  "Nothing  to  it,"  he  pronounced. 

She  said,  "Nothing  to  what?"  but  abandoned  this  position 
as  untenable.  She  despatched  the  maid  with  the  key  to  the 
wall  safe  in  her  husband's  room.  "Why  isn't  there  ?"  she  de 
manded.  "Rodney  won't  look  at  young  girls.  They  bore  him 
to  death — and  no  wonder,  because  he  freezes  them  perfectly 
brittle  with  fright.  But  Hermione's  really  pretty  intelligent. 
She  can  understand  fully  half  the  things  he  talks  about  and 
she's  clever  enough  to  pretend  about  the  rest.  She's  got  lots 
of  tact  and  skill,  she's  good-looking  and  young  enough — no 
older  than  I  and  I'm  two  years  younger  than  Roddy.  She'll 
appreciate  a  real  husband,  after  having  been  married  five 
years  to  John  Woodruff.  And  she's  rich  enough,  now,  so  that 
his  wild-eyed  way  of  practising  law  won't  matter." 

"All  very  nice  and  reasonable,"  he  conceded,  "but  some 
how  the  notion  of  Rodney  Aldrich  trying  to  marry  a  rich 
widow  is  one  I'm  not  equal  to  without  a  handicap  of  at  least 
two  cocktails."  He  looked  at  his  watch  again.  'By  the  way, 
didn't  yo\i  say  he  was  coming  early?" 

She  nodded.    "That's  what  he  told  me  this  morning  when 


A'S  PLAN  1? 

I  telephoned  him  to  remind  him  that  it  was  to-night.  He 
said  he  had  something  he  wanted  to  talk  to  me  about.  I  knew 
I  shouldn't  have  a  minute,  but  I  didn't  say  so  because  I 
thought  if  he  tried  to  get  here  early,  he  might  miss  being 
late." 

They  heard,  just  then,  faint  and  far-away,  the  ring  of  the 
door-bell,  at  which  she  cried,  "Oh,  dear!  There's  some  one 
already." 

"Wait  a  second,"  he  said.    "Let's  see  if  it's  him." 

The  paneled  walls  and  ceiling  of  their  hall  were  very  effi 
cient  sounding-boards  and  there  was  no  mistaking  the  voice 
they  heard  speaking  the  moment  the  door  opened — a  voice 
with  a  crisp  ring  to  it  that  sounded  always  younger  than  his 
years.  What  he  said  didn't  matter,  just  a  cheerful  greeting 
to  the  butler.  But  what  they  heard  the  butler  say  to  him  was 
disconcerting. 

"You're  terribly  wet,  sir." 

Frederica  turned  on  her  husband  a  look  of  despair. 

"He  didn't  come  in  a  taxi!  He's  walked  or  something, 
through  that  rain !  Do  run  down  and  see  what  he's  like.  And 
if  he's  very  bad,  send  him  up  to  me.  I  can  imagine  how  he'll 
look." 

She  was  mistaken  about  that  though.  For  once  Frederica 
had  overestimated  her  powers,  stimulated  though  they  were 
by  the  way  she  heard  her  husband  say,  "Good  lord!"  when 
the  sight  of  his  brother-in-law  burst  on  him. 

"Praise  heaven  you  can  wear  my  clothes,"  she  heard  him 
add.  "Run  along  up-stairs  and  break  yourself  gently  to 
Freddy." 

She  heard  him  come  squudging  up  the  stairs  and  along  the 
hall,  and  then  in  her  doorway  she  saw  him.  His  baggy  gray 
tweed  suit  was  dark  with  the  water  that  saturated  it.  The 
lower  part  of  his  trousers-legs,  in  irregular  vertical  creases, 
clung  dismally  to  his  ankles  and  toned  down  almost  indis- 
tinguishably  into  his  once  tan  boots  by  the  medium  of  a  liberal 
stipple  of  mnid  spatters.  Evidently  he  had  worn  no  over 
coat.  Both  his  side  pockets  had  been,  apparently,  strained  to 
the  utmost  to  accommodate  what  looked  like  a  bunch  of  paste- 


18  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

board-bound  note-books,  now  far  on  the  way  to  their  original 
pulp,  and  lopped  despondently  outward.  A  melancholy  pool 
had  already  begun  forming  about  his  feet. 

The  maddening,  but  yet — though  she  hadn't  much  room  for 
any  other  emotion — touching  thing  about  the  look  of  him, 
was  the  way  his  face,  above  the  dismal  wreck,  beamed  good- 
humored  innocent  affection  at  her.  It  was  a  big  featured, 
strong,  rosy  face,  and  the  unmistakable  intellectual  power  of 
it,  which  became  apparent  the  moment  he  got  his  faculties 
into  action,  had  a  trick  of  hiding,  at  other  times,  behind  a 
mere  robust  simplicity. 

"Good  gracious !"  he  said.  "I  didn't  know  you  were  going 
to  have  a  party." 

It  seemed  though,  he  didn't  want  to  make  an  issue  of  that. 
He  hedged.  "I  know  you  said  something  about  a  birthday 
cake,  but  I  thought  it  would  just  be  the  family.  So  instead 
of  dressing,  I  thought  I'd  walk  down  from  home.  It  takes 
about  the  same  time.  And  then  it  came  on  to  rain,  so  I  took 
a  street-car — and  got  put  off." 

It  appeared  from  the  way  she  echoed  his  last  two  words 
that  she  wanted  an  explanation.  He  was  painting  with  a 
large  brush  and  a  few  details  got  obliterated. 

"Got  into  a  row  with  the  conductor,  who  wanted  to  collect 
two  fares  for  one  ride,  so  I  walked  over  to  the  elevated — and 
back,  and  here  I  am." 

"Yes,  here  you  are,"  said  Frederica. 

She  didn't  mean  anything  by  that.  Already  she  was  mak 
ing  up  her  mind  what  she  would  do  with  him.  His  own  sug 
gestion  was  that  he  should  decamp  furtively  by  the  back 
stairs,  the  sound  of  new  arrivals  to  the  dinner  party  warning 
him  that  the  other  way  of  escape  was  barred.  Walters  could 
be  instructed  to  rescue  his  hat  for  him,  and  he  could  toddle 
along  down-town  again. 

She  didn't  give  him  time  to  complete  the  outline  of  this 
masterly  stratagem.  "Don't  be  impossible,  Rod,"  she  said. 
"Don't  you  even  know  whose  birthday  party  this  is?" 

He  looked  at  her,  frowned,  then  laughed.  He  had  a  great 
big  laugh. 


FREDERICA'S    PLAN  19 

"I  thought  it  was  one  of  the  kid's,"  he  said. 

"Well,  it  isn't,"  she  told  him.  "It's  yours.  And  those  peo 
ple  down  there  were  asked  to  meet  you.  And  you've  got  just 
about  seven  minutes  to  get  presentable  in.  Go  into  Martin's 
bathroom  and  take  off  those  horrible  clothes.  I'll  send  Walters 
in  to  lay  out  some  things  of  Martin's." 

She  came  up  to  him  and,  at  arm's  length,  touched  him  with 
cautious  finger-tips.  "And  do,  please,  there's  a  dear  boy," 
she  pleaded,  "hurry  as  fast  as  you  can,  and  then  come  down 
and  be  as  nice  as  you  can" — she  hesitated — "especially  to  Her- 
mione  Woodruff.  She  thinks  you're  a  wonder  and  I  don't 
want  her  to  be  disappointed." 

"The  widdy?"  he  asked.    "Sure  I'll  be  nice  to  her." 

She  looked  after  him  rather  dubiously  as  he  disappeared  in 
the  direction  of  her  husband's  room. 

She'd  have  felt  safer  about  him  if  he  had  seemed  more  sub 
dued  as  a  result  of  his  escapade.  There  was  a  sort  of  hilarious 
contentment  about  him  that  filled  her  with  misgivings. 

Well,  they  were  justified ! 

But  the  maddening  thing  was,  she  had  afterward  to  admit, 
that  the  disaster  had  been  largely  of  her  own  contriving.  She 
had  been  caught  in  the  net  of  her  own  stratagem — hoist  by 
her  own  petard. 

She  had  made  it  a  six-couple  dinner  in  order  to  insure  that 
the  talk  should  be  by  twos  rather  than  general,  and  she  had 
spent  a  good  half-hour  over  the  place-cards,  getting  them  to 
suit  her. 

Hermione  had  to  be  on  Martin's  right  hand,  of  course.  She 
was  just  back  in  the  city  after  an  absence  of  years,  and  every 
body  was  rushing  her.  She  put  Violet  Williamson,  whom 
Martin  was  always  flirting  with  in  a  harmless  way,  on  his 
left,  and  Rod  to  the  right  of  Hermione.  At  Rodney's  right, 
she  put  a  girl  he  had  known  for  years  and  cared  nothing  what 
ever  about,  and  then  Howard  West — who  probably  wasn't  in 
terested  in  her  either,  but  would  be  polite  because  he  was  to 
everybody.  Frederica  herself  sat  between  Carl  Leaventritt  of 
the  university — a  great  acquisition,  since  whatever  you  might 
think  of  him  as  an  empirical  psychologist,  there  was  no  doubt 


20  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

of  his  being  an  accomplished  diner-out — and  Toilet's  hus 
band,  as  he  vociferously  proclaimed  himself,  John  "Williamson, 
an  untired  business  man  who,  had  their  seasons  coincided, 
could  have  enjoyed  a  ball  game  in  the  afternoon  and  stayed 
awake  at  the  opera  in  the  evening.  Doctor  Randolph's  pretty 
wife  she  slid  in  between  Leaventritt  and  Howard  West,  and, 
in  happy  ignorance  of  what  the  result  was  going  to  be,  she  put 
Randolph  himself  between  Violet  and  Alice  West.  He  was 
a  young,  up-to-the-minute  mind  and  nerve  doctor. 

It  was  an  admirable  plan  all  right,  the  key-note  of  it  be 
ing,  as  you  no  doubt  will  have  observed,  the  easy  unforced 
isolation  of  Rodney  and  the  rich  widow.  Before  that  dinner 
was  over,  they  ought  to  be  old  friends. 

And,  for  a  little  while,  all  went  well.  Rodney  came  down 
almost  within  the  seven  minutes  she  had  allowed  him,  looking 
much  less  dreadful  than  she  had  expected,  in  her  husband's 
other  dress  suit,  and  not  forgetful,  it  appeared,  of  the  line  of 
behavior  she  had  enjoined  on  him;  namely,  that  he  was  to  be 
nice  to  Hermione  Woodruff. 

From  her  end  of  the  table,  she  saw  them  apparently  safely 
launched  in  conversation  over  the  hors-d'oeuvre,  took  a  look 
at  them  during  the  soup  to  see  that  all  was  still  well,  then  let 
herself  be  beguiled  into  a  conversation  with  John  Williamson, 
whom  she  liked  as  well  as  Martin  did  Violet.  She  never 
thought  of  the  objects  of  her  matrimonial  design  again  until 
her  ear  was  caught  by  a  huge  seven-cornered  word  in  her 
brother's  voice.  He  couldn't  be  saying  it  to  Hermione ;  no,  he 
was  leaning  forward,  shouting  at  Doctor  Randolph,  who  ap 
parently  knew  what  he  meant  and  was  getting  visibly  ready 
to  reply  in  kind. 

According  to  Violet  Williamson's  account,  given  confiden 
tially  in  the  drawing-room  afterward,  it  was  really  Hermione's 
fault.  "She  just  wouldn't  let  Rodney  alone — would  keep  talk 
ing  about  crime  and  Lombroso  and  psychiatric  laboratories 
— I'll  bet  she'd  got  hold  of  a  paper  of  his  somewhere  and 
read  it.  Anyway,  at  last  she  said,  'I  believe  Doctor  Randolph 
would  agree  with  me/  He  was  talking  to  me  then,  but  maybe 
that  isn't  why  she  did  it.  Well,  and  Rodney  straightened  up 


FBEDEKICA'S   PLAN  21 

and  said,  'Is  that  Randolph,  the  alienist !'  You  see  he  hadn't 
caught  his  name  when  they  were  introduced.  And  that's  how 
it  started.  Hermione  was  game — I'll  admit  that.  She  lis 
tened  and  kept  looking  interested,  and  every  now  and  then 
said  something.  Sometimes  they'd  take  the  trouble  to  smile 
and  say  'Yes,  indeed!' — politely,  you  know,  but  other  times 
they  wouldn't  pay  any  attention  at  all,  just  roll  along  over 
her  and  smash  her  flat — like  what's  his  name — Juggernaut." 

"You  don't  need  to  tell  me  that,"  said  Frederica.  "All  I 
didn't  know  was  how  it  started.  Didn't  I  sit  there  and  watch 
for  a  mortal  hour,  not  able  to  do  a  thing?  I  tried  to  signal 
to  Martin,  but  of  course  he  wasn't  opposite  to  me  and  .  .  ." 

"He  did  all  he  could,  really,"  Violet  answered  her.  "I  told 
him  to  go  to  the  rescue,  and  he  did,  bravely.  But  what  with 
Hermione  being  so  miffy  about  getting  frozen  out,  and  Martin 
himself  being  so  interested  in  what  they  were  shouting  at  each 
other — because  it  was  frightfully  interesting,  you  know,  if 
you  didn't  have  to  pretend  you  understood  it — why,  there 
wasn't  much  he  could  do." 

In  the  light  of  this  disaster,  she  was  rather  glad  the  men 
lingered  in  the  dining-room  as  long  as  they  did — glad  that 
Hermione  had  ordered  her  car  for  ten  and  took  the  odd  girl 
with  her.  She  made  no  effort  to  resist  the  departure  of  the 
others,  with  reasonable  promptitude,  in  their  train.  When, 
after  the  front  door  had  closed  for  the  last  time,  Martin  re 
leased  a  long  yawn,  she  told  him  to  run  along  to  bed;  she 
wanted  to  talk  with  Rodney,  who  was  to  spend  the  night 
while  his  own  clothes  were  drying  out  in  the  laundry. 

"Good  night,  old  chap,"  said  Martin  in  accents  of  lively 
commiseration,  "I'm  glad  I'm  not  in  for  what  you  are." 


CHAPTEE  IV 

ROSALIND  STANTON  DOESN'T  DISAPPEAR 

EODNEY  found  a  pipe  of  his  that  he  kept  concealed  on  the 
premises,  loaded  and  lighted  it,  sat  down  astride  a  spindling 
little  chair  that  looked  hardly  up  to  his  weight,  settled  his 
elbows  comfortably  on  the  back  of  it,  and  then  asked  his  sister 
what  Martin  had  meant — what  was  he  in  for? 

Frederica,  curled  up  in  a  corner  of  the  sofa,  finished  her 
own  train  of  thought  aloud,  first. 

"She's  awfully  attractive,  don't  you  think?  His  wife,  I 
mean.  Oh,  James  Eandolph's,  of  course."  She  turned  to 
Eodney,  looked  at  him  at  first  with  a  wry  pucker  between  her 
eyebrows,  then  with  a  smile,  and  finally  answered  his  ques 
tion.  "Nothing,"  she  said.  "I  mean,  I  was  going  to  scold 
you,  but  I'm  not." 

"Why,  yes,"  he  admitted  through  his  smoke.  "Eandolph's 
wife's  a  mighty  pretty  woman.  But  I  expect  that  lets  her 
out,  doesn't  it?" 

Frederica  shook  her  head.  "She's  a  good  deal  of  a  person, 
I  should  say,  on  the  strength  of  to-night's  showing.  She  kept 
her  face  perfectly  through  the  whole  thing — didn't  try  to  nag 
at  him  or  apologize  to  the  rest  of  us.  I'd  like  to  know  what 
she's  saying  to  him  now." 

Then,  "Oh,  I  was  furious  with  you  an  hour  ago,"  she  went 
on.  "I'd  made  such  a  nice,  reasonable,  really  beautiful  plan 
for  you,  and  given  you  a  tip  about  it,  and  then  I  sat  and 
watched  you  in  that  thoroughgoing  way  of  yours,  kicking  it 
all  to  bits.  But  somehow,  when  I  see  you  all  by  yourself,  thia 
way,  it  changes  things.  I  get  to  thinking  that  perhaps  my 
plan  was  silly  after  all — anyhow,  it  was  silly  to  make  it.  The 
plan  was,  of  course,  to  marry  you  off  to  Hermione  Woodruff." 

He  turned  this  over  in  his  deliberate  way,  during  the  process 

22 


ROSALIND   DOESN'T   DISAPPEAR  23 

of  blowing  two  or  three  smoke  rings,  began  gradually  to  grin, 
and  said  at  last,  "That  was  some  plan,  little  sister.  How  do 
you  think  of  things  like  that  ?  You  ought  to  write  romances 
for  the  magazines,  that's  what  you  ought  to  do." 

"I  don't  know/'  she  objected.  "If  reasonableness  counted 
for  anything  in  things  like  that,  it  was  a  pretty  good  plan. 
It  would  have  to  be  somebody  like  Hermione.  You  can't  get 
on  at  all  with  young  girls.  As  long  as  you  remember  they're 
around,  you're  afraid  to  say  anything  except  milk  and  water 
out  of  a  bottle  that  makes  them  furious,  and  then  if  you  for 
get  whom  you're  talking  to  and  begin  thinking  out  loud,  de 
veloping  some  idea  or  other,  you — simply  paralyze  them. 

"Well,  Hermione's  sophisticated  and  clever,  she's  lived  all 
over  the  place ;  she  isn't  old  yet,  and  she  was  a  brick  about  that 
awful  husband  of  hers — never  made  any  fuss — bluffed  it  out 
until  he,  luckily,  died.  Of  course  she'll  marry  again,  and  I 
just  thought,  if  you  liked  the  idea,  it  might  as  well  be  you." 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Rodney,  "whether  Mrs.  Woodruff 
knows  what  she  wants  or  not,  but  I  do.  She  wants  a  run  for 
her  money — a  big  house  to  live  in  three  months  in  the  year, 
with  a  flock  of  servants  and  a  fleet  of  motor-cars,  and  a  string 
of  what  she'll  call  cottages  to  float  around  among,  the  rest  of 
the  time.  And  she'll  want  a  nice,  tame,  trick  husband  to 
manage  things  for  her  and  be  considerate  and  affectionate  and 
amusing,  and,  generally  speaking,  Johnny-on-the-spot  when 
ever  she  wants  him.  If  she  has  sense  enough  to  know  what 
she  wants  in  advance,  it  will  be  all  right.  She  can  take  her 
pick  of  dozens.  But  if  she  gets  a  sentimental  notion  in  her 
head— and  I've  a  hunch  that  she's  subject  to  them — that  she 
wants  a  real  man,  with  something  of  his  own  to  do,  there'll 
be,  saving  your  presence,  hell  to  pay.  And  if  the  man  hap 
pened  to  be  me  .  .  . !" 

Frederica  stretched  her  slim  arms  outward.  Thoughtful- 
faced,  she  made  no  comment  on  his  analysis  of  the  situation, 
unless  a  much  more  observant  person  than  Rodney  might  have 
imagined  there  was  one  in  the  deliberate  way  in  which  she 
turned  her  rings,  one  at  a  time,  so  that  the  brilliant  masses 
of  gems  were  inside,  and  then  clenched  her  hands  over  them. 


24  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

He  had  got  up  and  was  ranging  comfortably  up  and  down 
the  room. 

"I  know  I  look  more  or  less  like  a  nut  to  the  people  who've 
always  known  us — father's  and  mother's  friends,  and  most  of 
their  children.  But  I  give  you  my  word,  Freddy,  that  most  of 
them  look  like  nuts  to  me.  Why,  they  live  in  curiosity  shops 
— so  many  things  around,  things  they  have  and  things  they've 
got  to  do,  that  they  can't  act  or  think  for  fear  of  breaking 
something. 

"Why  a  man  should  load  himself  up  with  three  houses  and 
a  yacht,  a  stable  of  motor-cars,  and  God  knows  what  besides, 
when  he's  rich  enough  to  buy  himself  real  space  and  leisure 
to  live  in,  is  a  thing  I  can't  figure  out  on  any  basis  except  of 
defective  intelligence.  I  suppose  they're  equally  puzzled  about 
me  when  I  refuse  a  profitable  piece  of  law  work  they've  offered 
me,  because  I  don't  consider  it  interesting.  All  the  same,  I 
get  what  I  want,  and  I'm  pretty  dubious  sometimes  whether 
they  do.  I  want  space — comfortable  elbow  room,  so  that  if  I 
happen  to  get  an  idea  by  the  tail,  I  can  swing  it  around  my 
head  without  knocking  over  the  lamp." 

"It's  a  luxury  though,  Rod,  that  kind  of  spaciousness,  and 
you  aren't  very  rich.  If  you  married  a  girl  without  any 
thing  .  .  ." 

He  broke  in  on  her  with  that  big  laugh  of  his.  "You've 
kept  your  sense  of  humor  pretty  well,  sis,  considering  you've 
been  married  all  these  years  to  a  man  as  rich  as  Martin,  but 
don't  spring  remarks  like  that,  or  I'll  think  you've  lost  it.  If 
a  man  can't  keep  an  open  space  around  him,  even  after  he's 
married,  on  an  income,  outside  of  what  he  can  earn,  of  ten 
or  twelve  thousand  dollars  a  year,  the  trouble  isn't  with  his 
income.  It's  with  the  content  of  his  own  skull." 

She  gave  a  little  shiver  and  snuggled  closer  into  a  big  down 
pillow. 

"You  will  marry  somebody,  though,  won't  you,  Roddy? 
I'll  try  not  to  nag  at  you  and  I  won't  make  any  more  silly 
plans,  but  I  can't  help  worrying  about  you,  living  alone  in 
that  awful  big  old  house.  Anybody  but  you  would  die  of  de 
spondency." 


ROSALIND    DOESN'T   DISAPPEAR  25 

"Oh,"  he  said,  "that's  what  I  meant  to  talk  to  you  about! 
I  sold  it  to-day — fifty  thousand  dollars — immediate  posses 
sion.  Man  wants  to  build  a  printing  establishment  there. 
You  come  down  sometime  next  week  and  pick  out  all  the 
things  you  think  you  and  Harriet  would  like  to  keep,  and  I'll 
auction  off  the  rest." 

She  shivered  again  and,  to  her  disgust,  found  that  her  eyea 
were  blurring  up  with  tears.  She  was  a  little  bit  slack  and 
edgy  to-day,  anyhow. 

But  really  there  was  something  rather  remorseless  about 
Rodney.  It  occurred  to  her  that  the  woman  he  finally  did 
marry  would  need  to  be  strong  and  courageous  and  rather  in 
sensitive  to  sentimental  fancies,  to  avoid  a  certain  amount  of 
unhappiness. 

What  he  had  just  referred  to  in  a  dozen  brisk  words,  was  the 
final  disappearance  of  the  home  they  had  all  grown  up  in. 
Their  father,  one  of  Chicago's  great  men  during  the  twenty 
great  years  between  the  Fire  and  the  Fair,  had  built  it  when 
the  neighborhood  included  nearly  all  the  other  big  men  of  that 
robust  period,  and  had  always  been  proud  of  it.  There  was 
hardly  a  stone  or  stick  about  it  that  hadn't  some  tender  happy 
association  for  her.  Of  course  for  years  the  neighborhood 
had  been  impossible.  Her  mother  had  clung  to  it  after  her 
husband's  death,  as  was  of  course  natural. 

But  when  she  had  followed  him,  a  year  ago  now,  it  was 
evident  that  the  old  place  would  have  to  go.  Rodney,  who 
had  lived  alone  with  her  there,  had  simply  stayed  on,  since 
her  death,  waiting  for  an  offer  for  it  that  suited  him.  Fred- 
erica  had  known  that,  of  course — had  worried  about  him,  as 
she  said,  and  in  her  imagination,  had  colored  his  loneliness 
to  the  same  dismal  hue  her  own  would  have  taken  on  in  sim 
ilar  circumstances. 

All  the  same,  his  curt  announcement  that  the  long-looked- 
for  change  had  come,  brought  up  quick  unwelcomed  tears. 
She  squeezed  them  away  with  her  palms. 

"You'll  come  to  us  then,  won't  you?"  she  asked,  but  quite 
without  conviction.  She  knew  what  he'd  say. 

"Heavens,  no !    Oh,  I'll  go  to  a  hotel  for  a  while — maybe 


B6  THE   REAL  ADVENTURE 

look  up  a  little  down-town  apartment,  with  a  Jap.  It  doesn't 
matter  much  about  that.  It's  a  load  off,  all  right." 

"Is  that/3  she  asked,  "why  you've  been  looking  so  sort  of — 
gay,  all  the  evening — as  if  you  were  licking  the  last  of  the 
canary's  feathers  off  your  whiskers  ?" 

"Perhaps  so,"  he  said.  "It's  been  a  pretty  good  day,  take 
it  all  round." 

She  got  up  from  the  couch,  shook  herself  down  into  her 
clothes  a  little,  and  came  over  to  him. 

"All  right,  since  it's  been  a  good  day,  let's  go  to  bed."  She 
put  her  hands  upon  his  shoulders.  "You're  rather  dreadful/' 
she  said,  "but  you're  a  dear.  You  don't  bite  my  head  off  when 
I  urge  you  to  get  married,  though  I  know  you  want  to.  But 
you  will  some  day — I  don't  mean  bite  my  head  off — won't  you, 
Rod?" 

"When  I  see  any  prospect  of  being  as  lucky  as  Martin — 
find  a  girl  who  won't  mind  when  I  turn  up  for  dinner  look 
ing  like  a  drowned  tramp,  or  kick  her  plans  to  bits,  after  she's 
tipped  me  off  as  to  what  she  wants  me  to  do  .  .  ." 

Frederica  took  her  hands  off,  stepped  back  and  looked  at 
him.  There  was  an  ironical  sort  of  smile  on  her  lips. 

"You're  such  an  innocent,"  she  said.  "You've  got  an  idea 
you  know  me — know  how  I  treat  Martin.  Roddy,  dear,  a 
girl's  brother  doesn't  matter.  She  isn't  dependent  on  him, 
nor  responsible  for  him.  And  if  she's  rather  sillily  fond  of 
him,  she's  likely  to  spoil  him  frightfully.  Don't  think  the 
girl  you  marry  will  ever  treat  you  like  that." 

"But  look  here!"  he  exclaimed.  "You  say  I  don't  know 
you,  whom  I've  lived  with  off  and  on  for  thirty  years — don't 
know  how  you'd  treat  me  if  you  were  married  to  me.  How 
in  thunder  am  I  going  to  know  about  the  girl  I  get  engaged 
to,  before  it's  too  late?" 

"You  won't,"  she  said.  "You  haven't  a  chance  in  the 
world." 

"Hm !"  he  grunted,  obviously  struck  with  this  idea.  "You're 
giving  the  prospect  of  marriage  new  attractions.  You're 
making  the  thing  out — an  adventure." 

She  nodded  rather  soberly.    U0h,  I'm  not  afraid  for  you," 


ROSALIND    DOESN'T    DISAPPEAR  27 

she  said.  "Men  like  adventures — you  more  than  most.  But 
women  don't.  They  like  to  dream  about  them,  but  they  want 
to  turn  over  to  the  last  chapter  and  see  how  it's  going  to  end. 
It's  the  girl  I'm  worried  about.  .  .  .  Oh,  come  along! 
We're  talking  nonsense.  I'll  go  up  with  you  and  see  that 
they've  given  you  pajamas  and  a  tooth-brush." 

She  had  accomplished  this  purpose,  kissed  him  good  night, 
and  under  the  hint  of  his  unbuttoned  waistcoat  and  his  wind 
ing  watch,  turned  to  leave  the  room,  when  her  eye  fell  on  a 
heap  of  damp,  warped,  pasteboard-bound  note-books,  which 
she  remembered  having  observed  in  his  side  pockets  when  he 
first  came  in.  The  color  on  the  pasteboard  binding  had  run, 
and  as  they  lay  on  the  drawn  linen  cover  to  the  chiffonier,  she 
went  over  and  picked  them  up  to  see  how  much  damage 
they'd  done.  Then  she  frowned,  peered  at  the  paper  label 
that  had  half  peeled  off  of  the  topmost  cover,  and  read  what 
was  written  on  it. 

"Who,"  she  asked  with  considerable  emphasis,  "is  Rosalind 
Stanton?" 

"Oh,"  said  Rodney  very  casually,  behind  the  worst  imita 
tion  of  a  yawn  she  had  ever  seen,  "oh,  she  got  put  off  the  car 
when  I  did." 

"That  sounds  rather  exciting,"  said  Frederica  behind  an 
imitation  yawn  of  her  own — but  a  better  one.  "Going  to  tell 
me  about  it?" 

"Nothing  much  to  tell,"  said  Rodney.  "There  was  a  row 
about  a  fare,  as  I  said.  The  conductor  was  evidently  solid 
concrete  above  the  collar-bone,  and  didn't  think  she'd  paid. 
And  she  grabbed  him  and  very  nearly  threw  him  out  into  the 
street — could  have  done  it,  I  believe,  as  easily  as  not.  And 
he  began  to  talk  about  punching  somebody's  head.  And  then, 
we  both  got  put  off.  So,  naturally,  I  walked  with  her  over 
to  the  elevated.  And  then  I  forgot  to  give  her  her  note-books 
and  came  away  with  them." 

"What  sort  of  looking  girl?"  asked  Frederica.  "Is  she 
pretty?" 

"Why,  I  don't  know,"  said  Rodney  judicially.  "Really,  you 
know,  I  hardly  got  a  fair  look  at  her." 


28'  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

Frederica  made  a  funny  sounding  laugh  and  wished  him  an 
abrupt  "good  night." 

She  was  a  great  old  girl,  Frederica — pretty  wise  about  lots 
of  things,  but  Rodney  was  inclined  to  think  she  was  mistaken 
in  saying  women  didn't  like  adventures.  Take  that  girl  this 
afternoon,  for  example.  Evidently  she  was  willing  to  meet 
one  half-way.  And  how  she'd  blazed  up  when  that  con 
ductor  touched  her!  Just  the  memory  of  it  brought  back 
something  of  the  thrill  he  had  felt  when  he  saw  it  happen. 

"You're  a  liar,  you  know,"  remarked  his  conscience,  "tell 
ing  Frederica  you  hadn't  had  a  good  look  at  her." 

On  the  contrary,  he  argued,  it  was  perfectly  justifiable  to 
deny  that  a  look  as  brief  as  that,  was  good.  He  wouldn't  deny, 
however,  that  the  thing  had  been  a  wholly  delightful  and  ex 
hilarating  little  episode.  That  was  the  way  to  have  things 
happen!  Have  them  pop  out  of  nowhere  at  you  and  disap 
pear  presently,  into  the  same  place. 

"Disappear  indeed!"  sneered  his  conscience.  "How  about 
those  note-books,  with  her  name  and  address  on  every  one. 
And  there's  another  lie  you  told — about  forgetting  to  give 
them'  to  her !" 

He  protested  that  it  was  entirely  true.  He  had  gone  into 
the  station  with  the  girl,  shaken  hands  with  her,  said  good 
night,  and  turned  away  to  leave  the  station,  unaware — as  evi 
dently  she  was — that  he  still  had  her  note-books  under  his 
arm.  But  it  was  equally  true  that  he  had  discovered  them 
there,  a  good  full  second  before  the  girl  had  turned  the  corner 
of  the  stairs — in  plenty  of  time  to  have  called  her  back  to  the 
barrier,  and  handed  them  over  to  her. 

"All  right,  have  it  your  own  way,"  said  Rodney  cheerfully, 
as  he  turned  out  the  light. 


THE  SECOND  ENCOUNTER 

POETIA  STANTON  was  late  for  lunch;  so,  after  stripping  off 
her  jacket  and  gloves,  rolling  up  her  veil  and  scowling  at 
herself  in  an  oblong  mahogany-framed  mirror  in  the  hall,  she 
walked  into  the  dining-room  with  her  hat  on.  Seeing  her 
mother  sitting  alone  at  the  lunch  table,  she  asked,  "Where 
is  Rose?" 

"She'll  be  down  presently,  I  think,"  her  mother  said.  "She 
called  out  to  me  that  she'd  only  be  a  minute,  when  I  passed 
her  door.  Does  your  hat  mean  you're  going  back  to  the  shop 
this  afternoon?" 

Portia  nodded,  pulled  back  her  chair  abruptly  and  sat 
down.  "Oh,  don't  ring  for  Inga,"  she  said.  "What's  here's 
all  right,  and  she  takes  forever." 

"I  thought  that  on  Saturday    .    .    ."  her  mother  began. 

"Oh,  I  know,"  said  Portia,  "but  Anne  Loomis  telephoned 
she's  going  to  bring  Dora  Wild  around  to  pick  out  which  of 
my  three  kidney  sofas  she  wants  for  a  wedding  present.  That 
girl  I've  got  isn't  much  good,  and  besides,  I  think  there's  a 
chance  that  Dora  may  give  me  her  house  to  do.  Her  man's 
stupidly  rich,  they  say,  and  richly  stupid,  so  the  job  ought  to 
be  worth  eating  a  cold  egg  for." 

You'd  have  known  them  for  mother  and  daughter  any 
where,  and  you'd  have  had  trouble  finding  any  point  of  re 
semblance  in  either  of  them  to  the  Amazonian  young  thing 
who  had  so  nearly  thrown  a  street-car  conductor  into  the 
street  the  night  before.  Their  foreheads  were  both  narrow 
and  rather  high,  their  noses  small  and  slightly  aquiline,  and 
both  of  them  had  slender  fastidious  hands. 

The  mother's  hair  was  very  soft  and  white,  and  the  care 
with  which  it  was  arranged  indicated  a  certain  harmless  van- 

29 


30  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

ity  in  it.  There  was  something  a  little  conscious,  too,  about  her 
dress — an  effect  difficult  to  describe  without  exaggeration. 
It  was  not  bizarre  nor  "artistic,"  but  you  would  have  under 
stood  at  once  that  its  departures  from  the  prevailing  mode 
were  made  on  principle.  If  you  took  it  in  connection  with  a 
certain  resolute  amiability  about  her  smile,  you  would  be  en 
tirely  prepared  to  hear  her  tell  Portia  that  she  was  reading 
a  paper  on  Modern  Tendencies  before  the  Pierian  Club  this 
afternoon. 

A  very  real  person,  nevertheless,  you  couldn't  doubt  that. 
The  marks  of  passionately  held  beliefs  and  eagerly  given  sac 
rifices  were  etched  with  undeniable  authenticity  in  her  face. 

Once  you  got  beyond  a  catalogue  of  features,  Portia  pre 
sented  rather  a  striking  contrast  to  this.  Her  hair  was  done — 
you  could  hardly  say  arranged — with  a  severity  that  was  fairly 
hostile.  Her  clothes  were  bruskly  cut  and  bruskly  worn, 
their  very  smartness  seeming  an  impatient  concession  to  ne 
cessity.  Her  smile,  if  not  ill-natured — it  wasn't  that — was 
distinctly  ironic.  A  very  competent,  good-looking  young 
woman,  you'd  have  said,  if  you'd  seen  her  with  her  shoulder- 
blades  flattened  down  and  her  chest  up.  Seeing  her  to-day, 
drooping  a  little  over  the  cold  lunch,  you'd  have  left  out  the 
adjective  young. 

"So  Rose  didn't  come  down  this  morning  at  all,"  Portia 
observed,  when  she  had  done  her  duty  by  the  egg.  "You 
took  her  breakfast  up  to  her,  I  suppose." 

Mrs.  Stanton  flushed  a  little.  "She  didn't  want  me  to,  but 
I  thought  she'd  better  keep  quiet/' 

"Nothing  particular  the  matter  with  her,  is  there?"  asked 
Portia. 

There  was  enough  real  concern  in  her  voice  to  save  the 
question  from  sounding  satirical,  but  her  mother's  manner 
was  still  a  little  apologetic  when  she  answered  it. 

"No,  I  think  not,"  she  said.  "I  think  the  mustard  foot 
bath  and  the  quinine  probably  averted  serious  consequences. 
But  she  was  in  such  a  state  when  she  came  home  last  night — 
literally  wet  through  to  the  skin,  and  blue  vrith  cold.  So  I 
thought  it  wouldn't  do  any  harm  .  .  ." 


THE    SECOND   ENCOUNTER  31 

"Of  course  not/'  said  Portia.  "You're  entitled  to  one  baby 
anyway,  mother,  dear.  Life  was  such  a  strenuous  thing  for 
you  when  the  rest  of  us  were  little,  that  you  hadn't  a  chance 
to  have  any  fun  with  us.  And  Rose  is  all  right.  She  won't 
spoil  badly." 

"I'm  a  little  bit  worried  about  the  loss  of  the  poor  child's 
note-books,"  said  her  mother.  "I  rather  hoped  they'd  come 
in  by  the  noon  mail.  But  they  didn't." 

"I  don't  believe  Rose  is  worrying  her  head  off  about  them," 
said  Portia. 

The  flush  in  her  mother's  cheeks  deepened  a  little,  but  it 
was  no  longer  apologetic. 

"I  don't  think  you're  quite  fair  to  Rose,  about  her  studies," 
she  said.  "The  child  may  not  be  making  a  brilliant  record, 
but  really,  considering  the  number  of  her  occupations,  it  seems 
to  me  she  does  very  well.  And  if  she  doesn't  Beem  always  to 
appreciate  her  privilege  in  getting  a  college  education,  as 
seriously  as  she  should,  you  should  remember  her  youth." 

"She's  twenty,"  said  Portia  bluntly.  "You  graduated  at 
that  age,  and  you  took  it  seriously  enough." 

"It's  very  different,"  her  mother  insisted.  "And  I'm  sure 
you  understand  the  difference  quite  well.  Higher  education 
was  still  an  experiment  for  women  then — one  of  the  things 
they  were  fighting  for.  And  those  of  us  by  whom  the  success 
of  the  experiment  was  to  be  judged  .  .  ." 

"I'm  sorry,  mother,"  Portia  interrupted  contritely.  "I'm 
tired  and  ugly  to-day,  and  I  didn't  mean  any  harm,  anyway. 
Of  course  Rose  is  all  right,  just  as  I  said.  And  she'll  prob 
ably  get  her  note-books  back  Monday."  Then,  "Didn't  she  say 
the  man's  name  was  Rodney  Aldrich  ?" 

"I  think  so,"  her  mother  agreed.    "Something  like  that." 

"It's  rather  funny,"  said  Portia.  "It's  hardly  likely  to  have 
been  the  real  Rodney  Aldrich.  Yet,  it's  not  a  common  name." 

"The  real  Rodney  Aldrich?"  questioned  her  mother.  But, 
without  waiting  for  her  daughter's  elucidation  of  the  phrase, 
she  added,  "Oh,  there's  Rose !" 

The  girl  came  shuffling  into  the  room  in  a  pair  of  old  bed 
room  slippers.  She  had  on  a  skirt  that  she  used  to  go  skating 


32  THE   REAL  ADVENTURE 

in,  md  a  somewhat  tumbled  middy-blouse.  Her  hair  was 
wopsed  around  her  head  anyhow — it  really  takes  one  of  Rose's 
own  words  to  describe  it.  As  a  toilet  representing  the  total  ac 
complishment  of  a  morning,  it  was  nothing  to  boast  of.  But, 
if  you'd  been  sitting  there,  invisibly,  where  you  could  see  her, 
you'd  have  straightened  up  and  drawn  a  deeper  breath  than 
you'd  indulged  in  lately,  and  felt  that  the  world  was  distinctly 
a  brighter  place  to  live  in  than  it  had  been  a  moment  before. 

She  came  up  behind  Portia,  whom  she  had  not  seen  before 
that  day,  and  enveloped  her  in  a  big  lazy  hug. 

"Back  to  work  another  Saturday  afternoon,  Angel?"  she 
asked  commiseratingly.  " Aren't  you  ever  going  to  stop  and 
have  any  fun?"  Then  she  slumped  into  a  chair,  heaved  a 
yawning  sigh  and  rubbed  her  eyes. 

"Tired,  dear?"  asked  her  mother.  She  said  it  under  her 
breath  in  the  hope  that  Portia  wouldn't  hear. 

"No,"  said  Rose.  "Just  sleepy."  She  yawned  again,  turned 
to  Portia,  and,  somewhat  to  their  surprise,  said :  "Yes,  what 
do  you  mean — the  real  Rodney  Aldrich?  He  looked  real 
enough  to  me.  And  his  arm  felt  real — the  one  he  was  going 
to  punch  the  conductor  with." 

"I  didn't  mean  he  was  imaginary,"  Portia  explained.  "I 
only  meant  I  didn't  believe  it  was  the  Rodney  Aldrich — who's 
so  awfully  prominent;  either  somebody  else  who  happened  to 
have  the  same  name,  or  somebody  who  just — said  that  was 
his  name." 

"What's  the  matter  with  the  prominent  one  ?"  Rose  wanted 
to  know.  "Why  couldn't  it  have  been  him  ?" 

Portia  admitted  that  it  could,  so  far  as  that  went,  but  in 
sisted  on  an  inherent  improbability.  A  millionaire,  a  member 
of  one  of  the  oldest  families  in  the  city — a  social  swell,  the 
brother  of  that  Mrs.  Martin  Whitney  whose  pictures  the 
papers  were  always  publishing  on  the  slightest  excuse — wasn't 
likely  to  be  found  riding  in  street-cars,  in  the  first  place,  and 
the  improbability  reached  a  climax  during  a  furious  storm 
like  that  of  last  night,  when,  if  ever  during  the  year,  the  real 
Rodney  Aldrich  would  be  saying,  "Home,  James,"  to  a  liveried 


THE    SECOND   ENCOUNTER  33 

chauffeur,  and  sinking  back  luxuriously  among  the  whip-cord 
cushions  of  a  palatial  limousine. 

I  hasten  to  say  that  these  were  not  Portia's  words;  all  the 
same,  what  Portia  did  say,  formed  a  basis  for  Rose's  unspoken 
caricature. 

"Millionaires  have  legs/'  she  said  aloud.  "I  bet  they  can 
walk  around  like  anybody  else.  However,  I  don't  care  who 
he  is,  if  he'll  send  back  my  books." 

Portia  went  back  presently  to  the  shop,  and  it  wasn't  long 
after  that  that  her  mother  came  down-stairs  clad  for  the  street, 
with  her  Modern  Tendencies  under  her  arm  in  a  leather  port 
folio. 

It  had  turned  cold  overnight,  and  there  was  a  buffeting 
gusty  wind  which  shook  the  windows  and  rattled  the  stiff 
branches  of  the  trees.  Her  mother's  valedictory,  given  with 
more  confidence  now  that  Portia  was  out  of  the  house,  was  a 
strong  recommendation  that  Rose  stay  quietly  within  doors 
and  keep  warm. 

The  girl  might  have  palmed  off  her  own  inclination  as  an 
example  of  filial  obedience,  but  she  didn't. 

"I  was  going  to,  anyway,"  she  said.  "Home  and  fireside  for 
mine  to-day." 

Ordinarily,  the  gale  would  have  tempted  her.  It  was  such 
good  fun  to  lean  up  against  it  and  force  your -way  through, 
while  it  tugged  at  your  skirts  and  hair  and  slapped  your  face. 

But  to-day,  the  warmest  corner  of  the  sitting-room  lounge, 
the  quiet  of  the  house,  deserted  except  for  Inga  in  the  kitchen, 
engaged  in  the  principal  sporting  event  of  her  domestic 
routine — the  weekly  baking;  the  fact  that  she  needn't  speak 
to  a  soul  for  three  hours,  a  detective  story  just  wild  enough 
to  make  little  intervals  in  the  occupation  of  doing  nothing  at 
all — presented  an  ideal  a  hundred  per  cent,  perfect. 

She  hadn't  meant  to  go  to  sleep,  having  already  slept  away 
half  the  morning,  but  the  author's  tactics  in  the  detective 
story  were  so  flagrantly  unfair,  he  was  so  manifestly  engaged 
trying  to  make  trouble  for  his  poor  anemic  characters  instead 
of  trying  to  solve  their  perplexities,  that  presently  she  tossed 


34  THE  REAL;  ADVENTURE 

the  book  aside  and  began  dreaming  one  of  her  own  in  which 
the  heroine  got  put  off  a  street-car  in  the  opening  chapter. 

The  telephone  bell  roused  her  once  or  twice,  far  enough  to 
observe  that  Inga  was  attending  to  it,  so  when  the  front  door 
bell  rang,  she  left  that  to  Inga,  too — didn't  even  sit  up  and 
swing  her  legs  off  the  couch  and  try,  with  a  prodigious  stretch, 
to  get  herself  awake,  until  she  heard  the  girl  say  casually : 

"Her  ban  right  in  the  sitting-room." 

So  it  fell  out  that  Rodney  Aldrich  had,  for  his  second  vivid 
picture  of  her, — the  first  had  been,  you  will  remember,  when 
she  had  seized  the  conductor  by  both  wrists,  and  had  said  in 
a  blaze  of  beautiful  wrath,  "Don't  dare  to  touch  me  like  that !" 
— a  splendid,  lazy,  tousled  creature,  in  a  chaotic  glory  of 
chestnut  hair,  an  unlaced  middy-blouse,  a  plaid  skirt  twisted 
round  her  knees,  and  a  pair  of  ridiculous  red  bedroom  slip 
pers,  with  red  pompons  on  the  toes.  The  creature  was  stretch 
ing  herself  with  the  grace  of  a  big  cat  that  has  just  been 
roused  from  a  nap  on  the  hearth-rug. 

If  his  first  picture  of  her  had  been  brief,  his  second  one  was 
practically  a  snap-shot,  because  at  sight  of  him,  she  flashed 
to  her  feet. 

So,  for  a  moment,  they  confronted  each  other  about  equally 
aghast,  flushed  up  to  the  hair,  and  simultaneously  and  inco 
herently,  begging  each  other's  pardon — neither  could  have 
said  for  what,  the  goddess  out  of  the  machine  being  Inga,  the 
maid-of-all-work.  But  suddenly,  at  a  twinkle  she  caught  in 
his  eye,  her  own  big  eyes  narrowed  and  her  big  mouth  wid 
ened  into  a  smile,  which  broke  presently  into  her  deep- 
throated  laugh,  whereupon  he  laughed  too,  and  they  shook 
hands,  and  she  asked  him  to  sit  down. 


*-  -I 

\i    -i:-;lit  i»i'   him    she   flushed   to  her   feet. 


CHAPTER  YI 

THE   BIG  HOKSE 

"IT'S  too  ridiculous,"  she  said.  "Since  last  night,  when  I 
got  to  thinking  how  I  must  have  looked,  wrestling  with  that 
conductor,  I've  been  telling  myself  that  if  I  ever  saw  you 
again,  I'd  try  to  act  like  a  lady.  But  it's  no  use,  is  it  ?" 

He  said  that  he,  too,  had  hoped  to  make  a  better  impression 
the  second  time  than  the  first.  That  was  what  he  brought  the 
books  back  for.  He  had  hoped  to  convince  her  that  a  man 
capable  of  consigning  a  half-drowned  girl  to  a  ten-mile  ride 
on  the  elevated,  instead  of  walking  her  over  to  his  sister's, 
having  her  dried  out  properly,  and  sent  home  in  a  motor, 
wasn't  permanently  and  chronically  as  blithering  an  idiot  as 
he  may  have  seemed.  It  was  a  great  load  off  of  his  mind  to 
find  her  alive  at  all. 

She  gave  him  a  humorously  exaggerated  account  of  the 
prophylactic  measures  her  mother  had  submitted  her  to  the 
night  before,  and  she  concluded : 

"I'm  awfully  sorry  mother's  not  at  home — mother  and  my 
sister  Portia.  They'd  both  like  to  thank  you  for — looking 
after  me  last  night.  Because  really,  you  did,  you  know." 

"There  never  was  anything  less  altruistic  in  the  world,"  he 
assured  her.  "I  dropped  off  of  that  car  solely  in  pursuit  of  a 
selfish  aim.  And  I  didn't  come  out  here  to-day  to  be  thanked, 
either.  I  mean,  of  course,  I'd  enjoy  meeting  your  mother  and 
sister  very  much,  but  what  I  came  for  was  to  get  acquainted 
with  you." 

He  saw  her  glance  wander  a  little  dubiously  to  the  door. 
"That  is,"  he  concluded,  "if  you  haven't  something  else  to  do." 

She  flushed  and  smiled.  "No,  it  wasn't  that,"  she  said.  "I 
was  trying  to  make  up  my  mind  whether  it  would  be  better 
to  ask  you  to  wait  here  ten  minutes  while  I  went  up  and  made 
myself  a  little  more  presentable.  ...  I  mean,  whether 

35 


36  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

you'd  rather  have  me  fit  to  look  at,  or  have  me  like  this  and 
not  be  bored  by  waiting.  It's  all  one  to  me,  you  see,  because 
even  if  I  did  come  down  again  presentable,  you'd  know — well, 
that  I  wasn't  that  way  naturally." 

Whereupon  he  laughed  out  again,  told  her  that  a  ten-minute 
wait  would  bore  him  horribly,  and  that  if  she  didn't  mind,  he 
much  preferred  her  natural. 

"All  right,"  she  said,  and  went  on  with  the  conversation 
where  she  had  interrupted  it. 

"Why,  I'm  nobody  much  to  get  acquainted  with,"  she  said. 
"Mother's  the  interesting  one — mother  and  Portia.  Mother's 
quite  a  person.  She's  Naomi  Rutledge  Stanton,  you  know." 

"I  know  I  ought  to  know,"  Rodney  said,  and  her  quick  ap 
preciative  smile  over  his  candor  rewarded  him  for  not  having 
pretended. 

"Oh,"  she  said,  "mother's  written  two  or  three  books,  and 
lots  of  magazine  articles,  about  women — women's  rights  and 
suffrage,  and  all  that.  She's  been — well,  sort  of  a  leader  ever 
since  she  graduated  from  college,  back  in — just  think ! — 
1870,  when  most  girls  used  to  have — accomplishments — 
Trench,  music,  and  washing  extra,'  you  know." 

She  said  it  all  with  a  quite  adorable  seriousness  and  his 
gravity  matched  hers  when  he  replied : 

"I  would  like  to  meet  her  very  much.  Feminism's  a  subject 
I'm  blankly  ignorant  about." 

"I  don't  believe,"  she  said  thoughtfully,  "that  I'd  call  it 
feminism  in  talking  to  mother  about  it,  if  I  were  you.  Moth 
er's  a  suffragist,  but" — there  came  another  wave  of  faint  color 
along  with  her  smile — "but — well,  she's  awfully  respectable, 
you  know." 

She  didn't  seem  to  mind  his  laughing  out  at  that,  though 
she  didn't  join  him. 

"What  about  the  other  interesting  member  of  the  family," 
he  asked  presently,  "your  sister?  Which  is  she,  a  suffragist 
or  a  feminist  ?" 

"I  suppose,"  she  said,  "you'll  call  Portia  a  feminist.  Any 
way,  she  smokes  cigarettes.  Oh,  can't  I  get  you  some  ?  I  for- 
got!" 


THE   BIG   HOESE  37 

He  had  a  case  of  his  own  in  his  pocket,  he  said,  and  got  one 
out  now  and  lighted  it. 

"Why,"  she  went  on,  "Portia  hasn't  time  to  talk  about  it 
much.  You  seo,  she's  a  business  woman.  She's  a  house  dec 
orator.  I  don't  mean  painting  and  paper-hanging.  She  tells 
you  what  kind  of  furniture  to  buy,  and  then  sells  it  to  you. 
Portia's  terribly  clever  and  awfully  independent." 

"All  right,"  he  said.  "That  brings  us  down  to  you.  What 
are  you  ?" 

She  sighed.  "I'm  sort  of  a  black  sheep,  I  guess.  I'm  just 
in  the  university.  But  I'm  to  be  a  lawyer." 

Whereupon  he  cried  out  "Good  lord !"  so  explosively  that 
she  fairly  jumped. 

Then  he  apologized,  said  he  didn't  know  why  her  announce 
ment  should  have  taken  him  like  that,  except  that  the  notion 
of  her  in  court  trying  a  case — he  was  a  lawyer  himself — 
seemed  rather  startling. 

She  sighed.  "And  now  I  suppose,"  she  said,  "you'll  advise 
me  not  to  be.  Portia  won't  hear  of  my  being  a  decorator.  She 
says  there's  nothing  in  it  any  more;  and  my  two  brothers — 
one's  a  professor  of  history  and  the  other's  a  high-school  prin 
cipal — say,  'Let  her  do  anything  but  teach.'  One  of  mother's 
great  friends  is  a  doctor,  and  she  says,  'Anything  but  medi 
cine,'  so  I  suppose  you'll  say,  'Anything  but  law.' " 

"Not  a  bit,"  he  said.  "It's  the  finest  profession  in  the 
world." 

But  he  said  it  off  the  top  of  his  mind.  Down  below,  it  was 
still  engaged  with  the  picture  of  her  in  a  dismal  court  room, 
blazing  up  at  a  jury  the  way  she  had  blazed  up  at  that  street 
car  conductor.  It  was  a  queer  notion.  He  didn't  know 
whether  he  liked  it  or  not. 

"I  suppose,"  she  hazarded,  "that  it's  awfully  dull  and  tire 
some,  though,  until  you  get  way  up  to  the  top." 

That  roused  him.  "It's  awfully  dull  when  you  do  get  to 
the  top,  or  what's  called  the  top — being  a  client  caretaker 
with  the  routine  law  business  of  a  few  big  corporations  and 
rich  estates  going  through  your  office  like  grist  through  a  mill. 
I  can't  imagine  anything  duller  than  that.  That's  supposed 


38  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

to  be  the  big  reward,  of  course.  That's  the  bundle  of  hay  they 
dangle  in  front  of  your  nose  to  keep  you  trotting  straight 
along  without  trying  to  see  around  your  blinders." 

He  was  out  of  his  chair  now,  tramping  up  and  down  the 
room.  "You're  not  supposed  to  discover  that  it's  interesting. 
You're  pretty  well  spoiled  for  their  purposes  if  you  do.  The 
thing  to  bear  in  mind,  if  you're  going  to  travel  their  road,  is 
that  a  case  is  worth  while  in  a  precise  and  unalterable  ratio  to 
the  amount  of  money  involved  in  it.  If  you  question  that 
axiom  at  all  seriously,  you're  lost.  That's  what  happened 
to  me." 

He  pulled  up  with  a  jerk,  looked  at  her  and  laughed.  "If 
my  sister  Frederica  were  here,"  he  explained,  "she  would  warn 
you,  out  of  a  long  knowledge  of  my  conversational  habits, 
that  now  was  the  time  for  you  to  ask  me, — firmly,  you  know, 
— if  I'd  been  to  see  Maude  Adams  in  this  new  thing  of  hers, 
or  something  like  that.  In  Frederica's  absence,  I  suppose  it's 
only  fair  to  warn  you  myself.  Have  you  been  to  see  it?  I 
haven't." 

She  smiled  in  a  sort  of  contented  amusement  and  let  that 
do  for  an  answer  to  his  question  about  Maude  Adams.  Then 
the  smile  transmuted  itself  into  a  look  of  thoughtful  gravity 
and  there  was  a  long  silence  which,  though  it  puzzled  him,  he 
made  no  move  to  break. 

At  last  she  pulled  in  a  long  breath,  turned  straight  to  him 
and  said,  "I  wish  you'd  tell  me  what  did  happen  to  you." 

And  under  the  compelling  sincerity  of  her,  for  the  next  two 
hours  and  a  half,  or  thereabouts,  he  did — told  it  as  he  had 
never  told  it  before — talked  as  Frederica,  who  thought  she 
knew  him,  had  never  heard  him  talk. 

He  told  her  how  he  had  started  at  the  foot  of  the  ladder  in 
one  of  the  big  successful  firms  of  what  he  called  "client  care 
takers,"  drawing  up  bills  and  writs,  rounding  up  witnesses  in 
personal  injury  suits,  trying  little  justice-shop  cases — the 
worst  of  them,  of  course,  because  there  was  a  youngster  just 
ahead  of  him  who  got  the  better  ones.  And  then,  dramatic 
ally,  he  told  of  his  discovery  amid  this  chaff,  of  a  real  legal  prob 
lem — a  problem  that  for  its  nice  intricacies  and  intellectual 


THE   BIG   HOKSE  39 

suggestiveness,  would  have  brought  an  appreciative  gleam  to 
the  eye  of  Mr.  Justice  Holmes,  or  Lord  Mansfield,  or  the  great 
Coke  himself.  He  told  of  the  passionate  enthusiasm  with 
which  he  had  attacked  it,  the  thrilling  weeks  of  labor  he  had 
put  on  it.  And  then  he  told  her  the  outcome  of  it  all ;  how 
the  head  of  the  firm,  an  old  friend  of  his  father,  had  called 
him  in  and  complimented  him  on  the  work  that  he  had  done ; 
said  it  was  very  remarkable,  hut,  unfortunately,  not  profitable 
to  the  firm,  the  whole  amount  involved  in  the  case  having 
been  some  twenty  dollars.  They  were  only  paying  him  forty 
dollars  a  month,  to  be  sure,  but  they  figured  that  forty  dollars 
practically  a  total  loss  and  they  thought  he  might  better  go 
to  practising  law  for  himself.  In  other  words,  he  was  fired, 

But  the  thing  that  rang  through  the  girl's  mind  like  the 
clang  of  a  bell — the  thing  that  made  her  catch  her  breath,  was 
the  quality  of  the  big  laugh  with  which  he  concluded  it.  He 
didn't  ask  her  to  be  sorry  for  him.  He  wasn't  sorry  for  him 
self  one  bit, — nor  bitter — nor  cynical.  He  didn't  even  seem 
trying  to  make  a  merit  of  his  refusal  to  acquiesce  in  that  sor 
did  point  of  view.  He  just  dismissed  the  thing  with  a  cymbal- 
like  clash  of  laughter  and  plunged  ahead  with  his  story. 

He  told  her  how  he'd  got  in  with  an  altruistic  bunch — the 
City  Homes  Association ;  how,  finding  him  keen  for  work  that 
they  had  little  time  for,  the  senior  legal  counselors  had  drawn 
out  and  let  him  do  it.  And  from  the  way  he  told  of  his  labors 
in  drafting  a  new  city  building  ordinance,  she  felt  that  it 
must  have  been  one  of  the  most  fascinating  occupations  in  the 
world,  until  he  told  her  how  it  had  drawn  him  into  politics — 
municipal,  city  council  politics,  which  was  even  more  thrill 
ing,  and  then  how,  after  an  election,  a  new  state's  attorney 
had  offered  him  a  position  on  his  staff  of  assistants. 

In  a  sense,  of  course,  it  was  true  that  he  had,  as  Frederica 
would  have  put  it,  forgotten  she  was  there — had  forgotten,  at 
least,  who  she  was.  Because,  if  he  had  remembered  that  she 
was  just  a  young  girl  in  the  university,  he  would  hardly,  as 
he  tramped  about  the  room  expounding  the  practise  of  crimi 
nal  law  in  the  state's  attorney's  office,  have  characterized 
the  state's  attorney  himself  as  a  "damned  gallery-playing 


40  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

mountebank,"  nor  have  described  the  professions  and  the  mis 
deeds  of  some  of  the  persons  he  prosecuted  in  blunt  Anglo- 
Saxon  terms  she  had  never  heard  used  except  in  the  Bible. 

The  girl  knew  he  had  forgotten,  and  her  only  discomfort 
came  from  the  fear  that  the  spell  might  be  broken  and  he  re 
member  suddenly  and  be  embarrassed  and  stop. 

In  the  deeper  sense — and  she  was  breathlessly  conscious  of 
this  too — he  hadn't  forgotten  she  was  there.  He  was  telling  it 
all  because  she  was  there — because  she  was  herself  and  nobody 
else.  She  knew,  though  how  she  couldn't  have  explained, — 
with  that  intuitive  certainty  that  is  the  only  real  certainty 
there  is, — that  the  story  couldn't  have  been  evoked  from  him 
in  just  that  way,  by  any  one  else  in  the  world. 

At  the  end  of  two  years  in  the  state's  attorney's  office,  he 
told  her,  he  figured  he  had  had  his  training  and  was  ready  to 
begin. 

"I  made  just  one  resolution  when  I  hung  out  my  shingle," 
he  said,  "and  that  was  that  no  matter  how  few  cases  I  got,  I 
wouldn't  take  any  that  weren't  interesting — that  didn't  give 
me  something  to  bite  on.  A  lot  of  my  friends  thought  I  was 
cra2y,  of  course — the  ones  who  came  around  because  they  liked 
me,  or  had  liked  my  father,  to  offer  me  nice  plummy  little 
sinecures,  and  got  told  I  didn't  want  them.  Just  for  the  sake 
of  looking  successful  and  accumulating  a  lot  of  junk  I  didn't 
want,  I  wasn't  going  to  asphyxiate  myself,  have  strings  tied 
to  my  arms  and  legs  like  a  damned  marionette.  I  wasn't  will 
ing  to  be  bored  for  any  reward  they  had  to  offer  me.  It's 
cynical  to  be  bored.  It's  the  worst  immorality  there  is.  Well, 
and  I  never  have  been." 

It  wasn't  all  autobiographical  and  narrative.  There  was  a 
lot  of  his  deep-breathing,  spacious  philosophy  of  life  mixed  up 
in  it.  And  this  the  girl,  consciously,  and  deliberately,  pro 
voked.  It  didn't  need  much.  She  said  something  about  dis 
cipline  and  he  snatched  the  word  away  from  her. 

"What  is  discipline?  Why,  it's  standing  the  gaff — standing 
it,  not  submitting  to  it.  It's  accepting  the  facts  of  life — of 
your  own  life,  as  they  happen  to  be.  It  isn't  being  conquered 


THE   BIG   HORSE  41 

by  them.  It's  not  making  masters  of  them,  but  servants  to 
the  underlying  things  you  want." 

She  tried  to  make  a  reservation  there — suppose  the  things 
you  wanted  weren't  good  things. 

But  he  wouldn't  allow  it. 

"Whatever  they  are,"  he  insisted,  "your  desires  are  the  only 
motive  forces  you've  got.  No  matter  how  fine  your  intelli 
gence  is,  it  can't  ride  anywhere  except  on  the  backs  of  your 
own  passions.  There's  no  good  lamenting  that  they're  not 
different,  and  it's  silly  to  beat  them  to  death  and  make  a 
merit  of  not  having  ridden  anywhere  because  they  might  have 
carried  you  into  trouble.  Learn  to  ride  them — control  them 
— spur  them.  But  don't  forget  that  they're  you  just  as  essen 
tially  as  the  rider  is." 

It  was  with  a  curiously  relaxed  body,  her  chin  cradled  in 
the  crook  of  her  arm  that  lay  along  the  back  of  the  couch,  her 
eyes  unfocused  on  the  window,  that  the  girl  listened  to  it. 

Primarily,  indeed,  she  wasn't  exactly  listening.  Much  of 
the  narrative  went  by  almost  unheard.  Much  of  the  philoso 
phy  she  hardly  tried  to  understand.  What  was  constantly 
present  and  more  and  more  poignantly  vivid  with  every  five 
minutes  that  ticked  away  on  the  banjo  clock,  was  a  conscious 
ness  of  the  man  himself,  the  driving  power  of  him,  the  boister 
ous  health  and  freshness  and  confidence.  She  was  conscious, 
too,  of  something  formidable — carelessly  exultant  in  his  own 
strength.  She  got  to  thinking  of  the  flight  of  a  great  bird 
wheeling  up  higher  and  higher  on  his  powerful  wings. 

He  had  caught  her  up,  too,  and  was  carrying  her  to  alti 
tudes  far  beyond  her  own  powers.  He  might  drop  her,  but  if 
he  did,  it  wouldn't  be  through  weakness.  At  what  he  said 
about  riding  on  the  backs  of  one's  own  passions,  her  imagina 
tion  varied  the  picture  so  that  she  saw  him  galloping  splen 
didly  by. 

At  that,  suddenly  and  to  her  consternation,  she  felt  her 
eyes  flushing  up  with  tears.  She  tried  to  blink  them  away, 
but  they  came  too  fast. 

Presently  he  stopped  short  in  his  walk — stopped  talking, 


13  THE   EEAL  ADVENTUKE 

with  a  gasp,  in  the  middle  of  a  sentence,  and  looked  into  her 
face.  She  couldn't  see  his  clearly,  but  she  saw  his  hands 
clench  and  heard  him  draw  a  long  breath.  Then  he  turned 
abruptly  and  walked  to  the  window  and  for  a  mortal  endless 
minute,  there  was  a  silence. 

At  last  she  found  something — it  didn't  matter  much  what 
— to  say,  and  the  conversation  between  them,  on  the  surface 
of  it,  was  just  what  it  had  been  for  the  first  ten  minutes  after 
he  had  come  in.  But,  paradoxically,  this  superficial  common- 
placeness  only  heightened  the  tensity  of  the  thing  that  under 
lay  it.  Something  had  happened  during  that  moment  while 
he  stood  looking  into  her  tear-flushed  eyes;  something  mo 
mentous,  critical,  which  no  previous  experience  in  her  life  had 
prepared  her  for. 

And  it  had  happened  to  him,  too.  The  memory  of  his  sil 
houette  as  he  stood  there  with  his  hands  clenched,  between  her 
and  the  window,  would  have  convinced  her,  had  she  needed 
convincing. 

The  commonplace  thing  she  had  found  to  say  met,  she 
knew,  a  need  that  was  his  as  well  as  hers,  for  breathing-space 
— for  time  for  the  recovery  of  lost  bearings.  Had  he  not  felt 
it  as  well  as  she — she  smiled  a  little  over  this — he  wouldn't 
have  yielded.  The  man  on  horseback  would  have  taken  an 
obstacle  like  that  without  breaking  the  stride  of  his  gallop. 

What  underlay  her  quiet  meaningless  chat,  was  wonder  and 
fear,  and  more  deeply  still,  a  sort  of  cosmic  contentment — the 
acquiescence  of  a  swimmer  in  the  still  irresistible  current  of  a 
mighty  river. 

It  was  distinctly  a  relief  to  her  when  her  mother  came  in 
and,  presently,  Portia.  She  introduced  him  to  them,  and 
then  dropped  out  of  the  conversation  altogether.  As  if  it 
were  a  long  way  off,  she  heard  him  retailing  last  night's  ad 
venture  and  expressing  his  regret  that  he  hadn't  taken  her  to 
Frederica  (that  was  his  sister,  Mrs.  Whitney)  to  be  dried  out, 
before  he  sent  her  home. 

She  was  aware  that  Portia  stole  a  look  at  her  in  a  puzzled 
penetrating  sort  of  way  every  now  and  then,  but  didn't  con 
cern  herself  as  to  the  basis  of  her  curiosity.  She  knew  that,  it 


THE   BIG    HOUSE  43 

was  getting  on  toward  their  dinner-time,  but  didn't  disturb 
herself  as  to  the  effect  Inga's  premonitory  rattlings  out  in  the 
dining-room  might  have  on  her  guest.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
they  had  none  whatever. 

She  smiled  once  widely  to  herself,  over  a  thought  of  the 
half-back.  The  man  here  in  the  room  with  her  now,  chatting 
so  pleasantly  with  her  mother,  wouldn't  ask  for  favors — 
would  accept  nothing  that  wasn't  offered  as  eagerly  as  it  was 
sought. 

It  wasn't  until  he  rose  to  go  that  she  aroused  herself  and 
went  with  him  into  the  hall.  There,  after  he'd  got  into  his 
overcoat  and  hooked  his  stick  over  his  arm,  he  held  out  his 
hand  to  her  in  formal  leave-taking.  Only  it  didn't  turn  out 
that  way.  For  the  effect  of  that  warm  lithe  grip  flew  its  flag 
in  both  their  faces. 

"You're  such  a  wonder !"  he  said. 

She  smiled.  "So  are  y-you."  It  was  the  first  time  she  had 
ever  stammered  in  her  life. 

When  she  came  back  into  the  sitting-room,  she  found  Portia 
inclined  to  be  severe. 

"Did  you  ask  him  to  come  again  ?"  she  wanted  to  know. 

Eose  smiled.    "I  never  thought  of  it,"  she  said. 

"Perhaps  it's  just  as  well,"  said  Portia.  "Did  you  have 
anything  at  all  to  say  to  him  before  we  came  home,  or  were 
you  like  that  all  the  while  ?  How  long  ago  did  he  come  ?" 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Kose  behind  a  very  real  yawn.  "I  was 
asleep  on  the  couch  when  he  came  in.  That's  why  I  was 
dressed  like  this."  And  then  she  said  she  was  hungry. 

There  wasn't,  on  the  whole,  a  happier  person  in  the  world 
at  that  moment. 

Because  Rodney  Aldrich,  pounding  along  at  five  miles  an 
hour,  in  a  direction  left  to  chance,  was  not  happy.  Or,  if  he 
was,  he  didn't  know  it.  He  couldn't  yield  instantly,  and 
easily,  to  his  intuitions,  as  Rose  had  done.  He  felt  that  he 
must  think — felt  that  he  had  never  stood  in  such  dire  need  of 
cool  level  consideration  as  at  this  moment. 

But  the  process  was  impossible.  That  fine  instrument  of 
precision,  his  mind,  that  had,  for  many  years,  done  without 


44  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

complaint  the  work  he  gave  it  to  do,  had  simply  gone  on  a 
strike.  Instead  of  ratiocinating  properly,  it  presented  pic 
tures.  Mainly  four :  a  girl,  flaming  with  indignation,  holding 
a  street-car  conductor  pinned  by  the  wrists;  a  girl  in  absurd 
bedroom  slippers,  her  skirt  twisted  around  her  knees,  her  hair 
a  chaos,  stretching  herself  awake  like  a  big  cat;  a  girl  with 
wonderful,  blue,  tear-brimming  eyes,  from  whose  glory  he  had 
had  to  turn  away.  Last  of  all,  the  girl  who  had  said  with  that 
adorable  stammer,  "So  are  y-you,"  and  smiled  a  smile  that 
had  summed  up  everything  that  was  desirable  in  the  world. 

It  was  late  that  night  when  his  mind,  in  a  dazed  sort  of 
way,  came  back  on  the  job.  And  the  first  thing  it  pointed  out 
to  him  was  that  Frederica  had  undoubtedly  been  right  in  tell 
ing  him  that,  though  they  had  lived  together  off  and  on  for 
thirty  years,  they  didn't  know  each  other.  The  pictures  his 
memory  held  of  his  sister,  covered  no  such  emotional  range 
as  these  four.  Did  Martin's?  It  seemed  absurd,  yet  there 
was  a  strong  intrinsic  probability  of  it. 

Anyway,  it  was  a  remark  Frederica  had  made  last  night  that 
gave  him  something  to  hold  on  by.  Marriage,  she  had  said, 
was  an  adventure,  the  essential  adventurousness  of  which 
no  amount  of  cautious  thought  taken  in  advance  could  modify. 
There  was  no  doubt  in  his  mind  that  marriage  with  that  girl 
would  be  a  more  wonderful  adventure  than  any  one  had  ever 
had  in  the  world. 

All  right  then,  perhaps  his  mind  had  been  right  in  refusing 
to  take  up  the  case.  The  one  tremendous  question, — would 
the  adventure  look  promising  enough  to  her  to  induce  her  to 
embark  on  it? — was  one  which  his  own  reasoning  powers 
could  not  be  expected  to  answer.  It  called  simply  for  experi 
ment. 

So,  turning  off  his  mind  again,  with  the  electric  light,  he 
went  to  bed. 


CHAPTEE  VII 

HOW   IT   STRUCK   POETIA 

IT  was  just  a  fortnight  later  that  Rose  told  her  mother  she 
was  going  to  marry  Rodney  Aldrich,  thereby  giving  that  lady 
a  greater  shock  of  surprise  than,  hitherto,  she  had  experienced 
in  the  sixty  years  of  a  tolerably  eventful  life. 

Rose  found  her  neatly  writing  a  paper  at  the  boudoir  desk 
in  the  little  room  she  called  her  den.  And  standing  dutifully 
at  her  mother's  side  until  she  saw  the  pen  make  a  period, 
made  then  her  momentous  announcement,  much  in  the  tone 
she  would  have  used  had  it  been  to  the  effect  that  she  was  go 
ing  to  the  matinee  with  him  that  afternoon. 

Mrs.  Stanton  said,  "What,  dear  ?"  indifferently  enough,  just 
in  mechanical  response  to  the  matter-of-fact  inflection  of 
Rosalind's  voice.  Then  she  laid  down  her  pen,  smiled  in  a 
puzzled  way  up  into  her  daughter's  face,  and  added,  "My  ears 
must  have  played  me  a  funny  trick.  What  did  you  say?" 

Rose  repeated:  "Rodney  Aldrich  and  I  are  going  to  be 
married." 

But  when  she  saw  a  look  of  painful  incomprehension  in  her 
mother's  face,  she  sat  down  on  the  arm  of  the  chair,  slid  a 
strong  arm  around  the  fragile  figure  and  hugged  it  up  against 
herself. 

"I  suppose,"  she  observed  contritely,  "that  I  ought  to  have 
broken  it  more  gradually.  But  I  never  think  of  things  like 
that." 

As  well  as  she  could,  her  mother  resisted  the  embrace. 

"I  can't  believe,"  she  said,  gripping  the  edge  of  her  desk 
with  both  hands,  "that  you  would  jest  about  a  solemn  subject 
like  that,  Rose,  and  yet  it's  incredible !  .  .  .  How  many 
times  have  you  seen  him?" 

"Oh,  lots  of  times,"  Rose  assured  her,  and  began  checking 

45 


46 

them  off  on  her  fingers.  "There  was  the  first  time,  in  the 
street-car,  and  the  time  he  brought  the  books  back,  and  that 
other  awful  call  he  made  one  evening,  when  we  were  all  so 
suffocatingly  polite.  You  know  about  those  times.  But  three 
or  four  times  more,  he's  come  down  to  the  university — he's 
great  friends  with  several  men  in  the  law  faculty,  so  he's 
there  quite  a  lot,  anyway — but  several  times  he's  picked  me 
up,  and  we've  gone  for  walks,  miles  and  miles  and  miles,  and 
we've  talked  and  talked  and  talked.  So  really,  we  know  each 
other  awfully  well." 

"I  didn't  know,"  said  her  mother  in  a  voice  still  dull  with 
astonishment,  "that  you  even  liked  him.  You've  been  so  silent 
• — indifferent — both  times  he  was  here  to  call.  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  I  haven't  learned  yet  to  talk  to  him  when  any  one  else 
is  around,"  Rose  admitted.  "There's  so  little  to  say,  and  it 
doesn't  seem  worth  the  bother.  But,  truly,  I  do  like  him, 
mother.  I  like  everything  about  him.  I  love  his  looks — I 
don't  mean  just  his  eyes  and  nose  and  mouth.  I  like  the  shape 
of  his  ears,  and  his  hands.  I  like  his  big  loud  voice" — her 
own  broadened  a  little  as  she  added,  "and  the  way  he  swears. 
Oh,  not  at  me,  mother!  Just  when  he  gets  so  interested  in 
what  he's  saying  that  he  forgets  I'm  a  lady. 

"And  I  like  the  way  he  likes  to  fight — not  with  his  fists,  I 
mean,  necessarily.  He's  got  the  most  wonderful  mind  to — 
wrestle  with,  you  know.  I  love  to  start  an  argument  with 
him,  just  to  see  how  easy  it  is  for  him  to — roll  me  in  the  dirt 
and  walk  all  over  me." 

The  mother  freed  herself  from  the  girl's  embrace,  rose  and 
walked  away  to  another  chair.  "If  you'll  talk  rationally  and 
seriously,  my  dear,"  she  said,  "we  can  continue  the  conversa 
tion.  But  this  flippant,  rather — vulgar  tone  you're  taking, 
pains  me  very  much." 

The  girl  flushed  to  the  hair.  "I  didn't  know  I  was  being 
flippant  and  vulgar,"  she  said.  "I  didn't  mean  to  be.  I  was 
just  trying  to  tell  you — all  about  it." 

"You've  told  me,"  said  her  mother,  "that  Mr.  Aldrich  has 
asked  you  to  marry  him  and  that  you've  consented.  It  seems 
to  me  you  have  done  so  hastily  and  thoughtlessly.  He's  told 


HOW    IT    STRUCK    PORTIA  47 

you  he  loves  you,  I've  no  doubt,  but  I  don't  see  how  it's  pos 
sible  for  you  to  feel  sure  on  such  short  acquaintance." 

"Why,  of  course  he's  told  me,"  Rose  said,  a  little  bewil 
dered.  "He  can't  help  telling  me  all  the  time,  any  more  than 
I  can  help  telling  him.  We're — rather  mad  about  each  other, 
really.  I  think  he's  the  most  wonderful  person  in  the  world, 
and" — she  smiled  a  little  uncertainly — "he  thinks  I  am.  But 
we've  tried  to  be  sensible  about  it,  and  think  it  out  reasonably. 
We're  both  strong  and  healthy,  and  we  like  each  other. 
.  .  .  I  mean — things  about  each  other,  like  I've  said. 
So,  as  far  as  we  can  tell,  we — fit.  He  said  he  couldn't  guar 
antee  that  we'd  be  happy ;  that  no  pair  of  people  could  be  sure 
of  that  till  they'd  tried.  But  he  said  it  looked  to  him  like  the 
most  wonderful,  magnificent  adventure  in  the  world,  and 
asked  if  it  looked  to  me  like  that,  and  I  said  it  did.  Because 
it's  true.  It's  the  only  thing  in  the  world  that  seems  worth — 
bothering  about.  And  we  both  think — though,  of  course,  we 
can't  be  sure  we're  thinking  straight — that  we've  got  a  good 
chance  to  make  it  go." 

Even  her  mother's  bewildered  ears  couldn't  distrust  the 
sincerity  with  which  the  girl  had  spoken.  But  this  only  in 
creased  the  bewilderment.  She  had  listened  with  a  sort  of 
incredulous  distaste  she  couldn't  keep  her  face  from  showing, 
and  at  last  she  had  to  wipe  away  her  tears. 

At  that  Rose  came  over  to  her,  dropped  on  the  floor  at  her 
knees  and  embraced  her. 

"I  guess  perhaps  I  understand,  mother,"  she  said.  "I  didn't 
realize — you've  always  been  so  intellectual  and  advanced — 
that  you'd  feel  that  way  about  it — be  shocked  because  I  hadn't 
pretended  not  to  care  for  him  and  been  shy  and  coy" — in  spite 
of  herself,  her  voice  got  an  edge  of  humor  in  it — "and  a 
startled  fawn,  you  know,  running  away,  but  just  not  fast 
enough  so  that  he  wouldn't  come  running  after  and  think 
he'd  made  a  wonderful  conquest  by  catching  me  at  last.  But 
a  man  like  Rodney  Aldrich  wouldn't  plead  and  protest, 
mother.  He  wouldn't  want  me  unless  I  wanted  him  just  as 
much." 

It  was  a  long  time  before  her  mother  spoke  and  when  she 


48  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

did,  she  spoke  humbly — resignedly,  as  if  admitting  that  the 
situation  she  was  confronted  with  was  beyond  her  powers. 

"It's  the  one  need  of  a  woman's  life,  Rose,  dear,"  she  said, 
" — the  corner-stone  of  all  her  happiness,  that  her  husband,  as 
you  say,  'wants'  her.  It's  something  that — not  in  words,  of 
course,  but  in  all  the  little  facts  of  married  life — she'll  need 
to  be  reassured  about  every  day.  Doubt  of  it  is  the  one  thing 
that  will  have  the  power  to  make  her  bitterly  unhappy.  That's 
why  it  seems  to  me  so  terribly  necessary  that  she  be  sure  about 
it  before  it's  too  late." 

"Yes,  of  course,"  said  Rose.  "But  that's  true  of  the  man, 
too,  isn't  it?  Otherwise,  where's  the  equality?" 

Her  mother  couldn't  answer  that  except  with  a  long  sigh. 

Strangely  enough,  it  wasn't  until  after  Rose  had  gone  away, 
and  she  had  shut  herself  up  in  her  room  to  think,  that  any 
other  aspect  of  the  situation  occurred  to  her — even  that  there 
was  another  aspect  of  it  which  she'd  naturally  have  expected 
to  be  the  first  and  only  critical  one. 

Ever  since  babyhood  Rose  had  been  devoted,  by  all  her 
mother's  plans  and  hopes,  to  the  furtherance  of  the  cause  of 
Woman,  whose  ardent  champion  she  herself  had  always  been. 
For  Rose — not  Portia — was  the  devoted  one. 

The  elder  daughter  had  been  born  at  a  time  when  her  own 
activities  were  at  their  height.  As  Portia  herself  had  said, 
when  she  and  her  two  brothers  were  little,  their  mother  had 
been  too  busy  to — luxuriate  in  them  very  much  and  during 
those  early  and  possibly  suggestible  years,  Portia  had  been 
suffered  to  grow  up,  as  it  were,  by  herself.  She  was  not  neg 
lected,  of  course,  and  she  was  dearly  loved.  But  when,  for  the 
first  time  since  actual  babyhood,  she  got  into  the  focal-plane 
of  her  mother's  mind  again,  there  was  a  subtle,  but,  it  seemed, 
ineradicable  antagonism  between  them,  though  that  perhaps 
is  too  strong  a  word  for  it.  A  difference  there  was,  anyway,  in 
the  grain  of  their  two  minds,  that  hindered  unreserved  confi 
dences,  no  matter  how  hard  they  might  try  for  them.  Portia's 
brusk  disdain  of  rhetoric,  her  habit  of  reducing  questions 
to  their  least  denominator  of  common  sense,  carried  a  con 
stant  and  perfectly  involuntary  criticism  of  her  mother's  am- 


49 

pier  and  more  emotional  style — made  her  suspect  that  Portia 
regarded  her  as  a  sentimentalist. 

But  Rose,  with  her  first  adorable  smile,  had  captured  her 
mother's  heart  beyond  the  possibility  of  reservation  or  re 
straint.  And,  as  the  child  grew  and  her  splendid,  exuberant 
vitality  and  courage  and  wide-reaching,  though  not  facile,  af 
fection  became  marked  characteristics,  the  hope  grew  in  her 
mother  that  here  was  a  new  leader  born  to  the  great  Cause. 
It  would  need  new  leaders.  She  herself  was  conscious  of  a 
side  drift  to  the  great  current,  that  threatened  to  leave  her  in 
a  backwater.  Or,  as  she  put  it  to  herself,  that  threatened  to 
sweep  over  the  banks  of  righteousness  and  decorum,  and  in 
undate,  disastrously,  the  peaceful  fields. 

She  couldn't  expect  to  have  the  strength  to  resist  this  drift 
herself,  but  she  had  a  vision  of  her  daughter  rising  splendidly 
to  the  task.  And  for  that  task  she  trained  her — or  thought  she 
did;  saw  to  it  that  the  girl  understood  the  Eighteenth  Cen 
tury  Liberalism,  which,  limited  to  the  fields  of  politics  and 
education,  and  extended  to  include  women  equally  with  men, 
was  the  gospel  of  the  movement  she  had  grown  up  in.  With 
it  for  a  background,  with  a  university  education  and  a  legal 
training,  the  girl  would  have  everything  she  needed. 

She  expected  her  to  marry,  of  course.  But  in  her  day 
dreams,  it  was  to  be  one  of  Rose's  converts  to  the  cause — won 
perhaps  by  her  advocacy  at  the  bar,  of  some  legal  case  involv 
ing  the  rights  of  woman — who  was  to  lay  his  new-born  con 
viction,  along  with  his  personal  adoration,  at  the  girl's  feet. 

Certainly  Rodney  Aldrich,  who,  as  Rose  outrageously  had 
boasted,  rolled  her  in  the  dust  and  tramped  all  over  her  in  the 
course  of  their  arguments,  presented  a  violent  contrast  to  the 
ideal  husband  she  had  selected.  Indeed,  it  should  be  hard  to 
think  of  him  as  anything  but  the  rock  on  which  her  whole  am 
bition  for  the  girl  would  be  shattered. 

It  was  strange  she  hadn't  thought  of  that  during  her  talk 
with  Rose ! 

Npw  that  the  idea  had  occurred  to  her  she  tried  hard  to  look 
at  the  event  that  way  and  to  nurse  into  energetic  life  a  tragic 
regret  over  the  miscarriage  of  a  lifetime's  hope.  It  was  all  so 


50  THB   REAE   ADVENTURE 

obviously  what  she  ought  to  feel.  Yet  the  moment  she  re 
laxed  the  effort,  her  mind  flew  back  to  a  vibration  between  a 
hope  and  a  fear:  the  hope,  that  the  man  Rose  was  about  to 
marry  would  shelter  and  protect  her  always,  as  tenderly  as 
she  herself  had  sheltered  her;  the  terror — and  this  was 
stronger — that  he  might  not. 

That  night,  during  the  process  of  getting  ready  for  bed, 
Rose  put  on  a  bath-robe,  picked  up  her  hair  brush  and  went 
into  Portia's  room.  Portia,  much  quicker  always  about  such 
matters,  was  already  on  the  point  of  turning  out  the  light, 
but  guessing  what  her  sister  wanted,  she  stacked  her  pillows, 
lighted  a  cigarette,  climbed  into  bed  and  settled  back  com 
fortably  for  a  chat. 

"I  hope,"  Rose  began,  "that  you're  really  pleased  about  it. 
Because  mother  isn't.  She's  terribly  unhappy.  Do  you  sup 
pose  it's  because  she  thinks  I've — well,  sort  of  deserted  her, 
in  not  going  on  and  being  a  lawyer — and  all  that  ?" 

"Oh,  perhaps,"  said  Portia  indifferently.  "I  wouldn't 
worry  about  that,  though.  Because  really,  child,  you  had 
no  more  chance  of  growing  up  to  be  a  lawyer  and  a  leader  of 
the  'Cause'  than  I  have  of  getting  to  be  a  brigadier-general." 

Rose  stopped  brushing  her  hair  and  demanded  to  be  told 
why  not.  She  had  been  getting  on  all  right  up  to  now,  hadn't 
she? 

"Why,  just  think,"  said  Portia,  "what  mother  herself  had 
gone  through  when  she  was  your  age;  put  herself  through 
college  because  her  father  didn't  believe  in  'higher  education' 
— practically  disowned  her.  She'd  taught  six  mouths  in  that 
awful  school — remember? — she  was  used  to  being  abused 
and  ridiculed.  And  she  was  working  hard  enough  to  have 
killed  a  camel.  But  you!  .  .  .  Why,  Lamb,  you've 
never  really  had  to  do  anything  in  your  life.  If  you  felt 
like  it,  all  right — and  equally  all  right  if  you  didn't. 
You've  never  been  hurt — never  even  been  frightened.  You 
wouldn't  know  what  they  felt  like.  And  the  result  is  .  .  .  " 

Portia  drew  in  a  long  puff,  then  eyed  her  cigarette  thought 
fully  through  the  slowly  expelled  smoke.  "The  result  is,"  she 
concluded,  "that  you  have  grown  up  into  a  big,  splendid, 


HOW   IT    STRUCK   PORTIA  51 

fearless,  confiding  creature  that  it's  perfectly  inevitable  some 
man  like  Rodney  Aldrich  would  go  straight  out  of  his  head 
about.  And  there  you  are/' 

A  troubled  questioning  look  came  into  the  younger  sister's 
eyes.  "I've  been  lazy  and  selfish,  I  know,"  she  said.  "Per 
haps  more  than  I  thought.  I  haven't  meant  to  be.  But 
.  .  .  Do  you  think  I'm  any  good  at  all  ?" 

"That's  the  real  injustice  of  it,"  said  Portia ;  "that  you  are. 
You've  stayed  big  and  simple.  It  couldn't  possibly  occur  to 
you  now  to  say  to  yourself,  'Poor  old  Portia!  She's  always 
been  jealous  because  mother  liked  me  best,  and  now  she's  just 
green  with  envy  because  I'm  going  to  marry  Rodney  Al 
drich.'  " 

She  wouldn't  stop  to  hear  Rose's  protest.  "I  know  it 
couldn't,"  she  went  on.  "That's  what  I  say.  And  yet  there's 
more  than  a  little  truth  in  it,  I  suppose.  Oh,  I  don't  mean 
I'm  sorry  you're  going  to  be  happy — I  believe  you  are,  you 
know.  I'm  just  a  little  sorry  for  myself.  Curious,  anyway,  to 
see  where  I've  missed  all  the  big  important  things  you've  kept. 
I've  been  afraid  of  my  instincts,  I  suppose.  Never  able  to 
take  a  leap  because  I've  always  stopped  to  look,  first.  I'm  too 
narrow  between  the  cheek-bones,  perhaps.  Anyhow,  here  I 
stay,  grinding  along,  wondering  what  it's  all  about  and  what 
after  all's  the  use.  .  .  .  While  you,  you  baby !  are  going 
to  find  out." 

What  Rose  wanted  to  do  was  to  gather  her  sister  up  in  her 
arms  and  kiss  her.  But  the  faint  ironic  smile  on  Portia's 
fine  lips,  the  twist  of  her  eyebrows,  the  poise  of  her  body  as 
she  sat  up  in  bed  watching  the  blue-brown  smoke  rising  in 
a  straight  thin  line  from  her  diminishing  cigarette,  combined 
to  make  such  a  demonstration  altogether  impossible. 

"Mother  thinks,  I  guess,"  she  said,  to  break  the  silence, 
"that  I  ought  to  have  looked  a  little  longer.  She  thinks  Rod 
ney  would  have  'wanted'  me  more,  if  I  hadn't  thrown  myself 
at  him  like  that." 

Portia  extinguished  her  cigarette  in  a  little  ash-tray,  and 
began  unpacking  her  pillows  before  she  spoke.  "I  don't 
know/'  she  said,  at  last.  "It's  been  said  for  a  long  time  that 


52  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

the  only  way  to  make  a  man  want  anything  very  wildly,  is  to 
make  him  think  it's  desperately  hard  to  get.  But  I  suspect 
there  are  other  ways.  I  don't  believe  you'll  ever  have  any 
trouble  making  him  'want'  you  as  much  as  you  like." 

The  color  kept  mounting  higher  and  higher  in  the  girl's 
face  during  the  moment  of  silence  while  she  pondered  this 
remark.  "Why  should  I — make  him  want  me? — Any  more 
than  ...  I  think  that's  rather — horrid,  Portia." 

Portia  gave  a  little  shiver  and  huddled  down  into  her  blan 
kets.  "You  don't  put  things  out  of  existence  by  deciding 
they're  horrid,  child,"  she  said.  "Open  my  window,  will  you  ? 
And  throw  out  that  cigarette.  There.  Now,  kiss  me  and  run 
along  to  bye-bye.  And  forget  my  nonsense." 


CHAPTEE  VIII 
EODNEY'S  EXPERIMENT 

THE  wedding  was  set  for  the  first  week  in  June.  And  the 
decision,  instantly  acquiesced  in  by  everybody,  was  that  it  was 
to  be  as  quiet — as  strictly  a  family  affair — as  possible.  The 
recentness  of  the  death  of  Rodney's  mother  gave  an  adequate 
excuse  for  such  an  arrangement,  but  the  comparative  narrow 
ness  of  the  Stantons'  domestic  resources  enforced  it.  Indeed, 
the  notion  of  even  a  simple  wedding  into  the  Aldrich  family 
left  Portia  rather  aghast. 

But  this  feeling  was  largely  allayed  by  Frederica's  first  call. 
Being  a  celebrated  beauty  and  a  person  of  great  social  conse 
quence  didn't,  it  appeared,  prevent  one  from  being  human 
and  simple  mannered  and  altogether  delightful  to  have  about. 
She  was  so  competent,  too,  and  intelligent  (Eose  didn't  see 
why  Portia  should  find  anything  extraordinary  in  all  this. 
Wasn't  she  Rodney's  sister?)  that  her  conquest  of  the  Stanton 
family  was  instantaneous.  They  didn't  suspect  that  it  was 
deliberate. 

Rodney  had  made  his  great  announcement  to  her,  charac 
teristically,  over  the  telephone,  from  his  office.  "Do  you  re 
member  asking  me,  Freddy,  two  or  three  weeks  ago,  who  Rosa 
lind  Stanton  was?  Well,  she's  the  girl  I'm  going  to  marry." 

She  refused  to  hear  a  word  more  in  those  circumstances. 
"I'm  coming  straight  down,"  she  said,  "and  we'll  go  some 
where  for  lunch.  Don't  you  realize  that  we  can't  talk  about  it 
like  this  ?  Of  course  you  wouldn't,  but  it's  so." 

Over  the  lunch  table  she  got  as  detailed  an  account  of  the 
affair  as  Eodney,  in  his  somnambulistic  condition,  was  able  to 
give  her,  and  she  passed  it  on  to  Martin  that  evening  as  they 
drove  across  to  the  north  side  for  dinner. 

"Well,  that  all  sounds  exactly  like  Rodney,"  he  commented. 
"I  hope  you'll  like  the  girl." 

53 


54  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"That  isn't  what  I  hope/'  said  Frederica.  "At  least  it  isn't 
what  I'm  most  concerned  about.  I  hope  I  can  make  her  like 
me.  Roddy's  the  only  brother  I've  got  in  the  world,  and  I'm 
not  going  to  lose  him  if  I  can  help  it.  That's  what  will  hap 
pen  if  she  doesn't  like  me." 

Frederica  was  perfectly  clear  about  this,  though  she  ad 
mitted  it  had  taken  her  fifteen  minutes  or  so  to  see  it. 

"All  the  way  down-town  to  talk  to  Rodney,"  she  said,  "I 
sat  there  deciding  what  she  ought  to  be  like — as  if  she  were 
going  to  be  brought  up  to  me  to  see  if  she'd  do.  And  then 
all  at  once  I  thought,  what  good  would  it  do  me  to  decide  that 
she  wouldn't?  I  couldn't  change  his  relation  to  her  one  bit. 
But,  if  she  decides  I  won't  do,  she  can  change  his  relation 
to  me  pretty  completely.  It's  about  the  easiest  thing  a  wife 
can  do. 

"Well,  I'm  going  to  see  her,  and  her  mother  and  sister — 
that's  the  family — to-morrow.  And  if  they  don't  like  me  be 
fore  I  come  away  and  think  of  me  as  a  nice  sort  of  person 
to  be  related  by  marriage  to,  it  won't  be  because  I  haven't 
tried.  It  will  be  because  I'm  just  a  naturally  repulsive  person 
and  can't  help  it." 

As  it  happened  though,  she  forgot  all  about  her  resolution 
almost  with  her  first  look  at  Rose.  Rodney's  attempts  at  de 
scription  of  her  had  been  well  meaning ;  but  what  he  had  pre 
pared  his  sister  for,  unconsciously  of  course,  in  his  emphasis 
on  one  or  two  phases  of  their  first  acquaintance,  had  been  a 
sort  of  slatternly  Amazon.  But  the  effect  of  this  was,  really, 
very  happy;  because  when  a  perfectly  presentably  clad,  well- 
bred,  admirably  poised  young  girl  came  into  the  room  and 
greeted  her  neither  shyly  nor  eagerly,  nor  with  any  affecta 
tion  of  ease,  a  girl  who  didn't  try  to  pretend  it  wasn't  a  crit 
ical  moment  for  her  but  was  game  enough  to  meet  it  without 
any  evidences  of  panic — when  Frederica  realized  that  this  was 
the  Rose  whom  Rodney  had  been  telling  her  about,  she  fell  in 
love  with  her  on  the  spot. 

Amazingly,  as  she  watched  the  girl  and  heard  her  talk,  she 
found  she  was  considering,  not  Rose's  availability  as  a  wife 
for  Rodney,  but  Rodney's  as  a  husband  for  her.  It  was  this, 


RODNEY'S    EXPERIMENT  55 

perhaps,  that  led  her  to  say,  at  the  end  of  her  leave-taking, 
just  as  Rose,  who  had  come  out  into  the  hall  with  her,  was 
opening  the  door : 

"Roddy  has  been  such  a  wonderful  brother,  always,  to  me, 
that  I  suspect  you'll  find  him,  sometimes,  being  a  brother  to 
you.  Don't  let  it  hurt  you  if  that  happens." 

The  most  vivid  of  all  the  memories  that  Frederica  took 
away  with  her  from  that  memorable  visit  was  the  smile  with 
whicli  Rose  had  answered  that  remark.  She  had  her  chauffeur 
stop  at  the  first  drug  store  they  came  to  and  called  up  Rod 
ney  on  the  telephone,  just  because  she  was  too  impatient  to 
wait  any  longer  for  a  talk  with  him. 

"I'm  simply  idiotic  about  her,"  she  told  him.  "I  know, 
now,  what  you  meant  when  you  were  trying  to  tell  me  about 
her  smile.  She  looked  at  me  like  that  just  as  I  was  leaving, 
and  my  throat's  tight  with  it  yet.  She's  such  a  darling! 
Don't  be  too  much  annoyed  if  I  put  my  oar  in  once  in  a  while, 
just  to  see  that  you're  treating  her  properly." 

She  walked  into  his  office  one  morning  a  few  days  later, 
dismissed  his  stenographer  with  a  nod,  and  sat  down  in  the 
just  vacated  chair.  She  was  sorry,  she  said,  but  it  was  the 
only  way  she  had  left,  nowadays,  of  getting  hold  of  him. 
Then  she  introduced  a  trivial,  transparent  little  errand  for 
an  excuse,  and,  having  got  it  out  of  the  way,  inquired  after 
Rose.  What  had  the  two  of  them  been  doing  lately  ? 

"Getting  acquainted,"  he  said.  "It's  going  to  be  an  endless 
process,  apparently.  Heavens,  what  a  lot  there  is  to  talk 
about !" 

"Yes,"  Frederica  persisted,  "but  what  do  you  do  by  way  of 
being — nice  to  her?"  And  as  he  only  looked  puzzled  and 
rather  unhappy,  she  elucidated  further.  "What's  your  conces 
sion,  dear  old  stupid,  to  the  fact  that  you're  her  lover — in 
the  way  of  presents  and  flowers  and  theaters  and  things  ?" 

"But  Rose  isn't  like  the  rest  of  them,"  he  objected.  "She 
doesn't  care  anything  about  that  sort  of  thing." 

Whereat  Frederica  laughed.  "Try  it,"  she  said,  "just  for 
an  experiment,  Roddy.  Don't  ask  her  if  she  wants  to  go, 
ask  her  to  go.  Get  tickets  for  one  of  the  musical  things,  en- 


56  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

gage  a  table  for  dinner  and  for  supper,  at  two  of  the  restau 
rants,  and  send  her  flowers.  Do  it  handsomely,  you  know,  as 
if  ordinary  things  weren't  good  enough  for  her.  Oh,  and  take 
our  big  car.  Taxis  wouldn't  quite  be  in  the  picture.  Try 
it,  Eoddy,  just  to  see  what  happens." 

He  looked  thoughtful  at  first,  then  interested,  and  at  last 
he  smiled,  reached  over  and  patted  her  hand.  "All  right, 
Freddy,"  he  said.  "The  handsome  thing  shall  be  done." 

The  result  was  that  at  a  quarter  past  one  A.  M.,  a  night  or 
two  later,  he  tipped  the  carriageman  at  the  entrance  to  the 
smartest  of  Chicago's  supper  restaurants,  stepped  into  Mar 
tin's  biggest  limousine,  and  dropped  back  on  the  cushions  be 
side  a  girl  he  hardly  knew. 

"You  wonder !"  he  said,  as  her  hand  slid  into  his.  "I  didn't 
know  you  could  shine  like  that.  All  the  evening  you've  kept 
my  heart  in  my  throat.  I  don't  know  a  thing  we've  seen  or 
eaten — hardly  where  we've  been." 

"I  do,"  she  declared,  "and  I  shall  never  forget  it.  Xot 
one  smallest  thing  about  it.  You  see,  it's  the  first  time  any 
thing  like  it  ever  happened  to  me." 

He  exclaimed  incredulously  at  that — wanted  to  know  what 
she  meant. 

He  felt  the  weight  of  her  relaxed  contented  body,  as  she 
leaned  closer  to  him — felt  her  draw  in  a  long  slow  sigh.  "I 
don't  know  whether  I  can  talk  sense  to-night  or  not,"  she  said, 
"but  I'll  try.  Why,  I've  been  quite  a  lot  at  the  theater,  of 
course,  and  two  or  three  times  to  the  restaurants.  But  never 
— oh,  as  if  I  belonged  like  that.  It  always  seemed  a  little 
wrong,  and  extravagant.  And  then,  it's  never  lasted.  After 
the  theater,  or  the  dinner,  I've  walked  over  to  the  elevated, 
you  know.  So  this  has  been  like — well,  like  flying  in  a  dream, 
without  any  bumps  to  wake  me  up.  It  sort  of  goes  to  my 
head  just  to  be  sitting  here  like  this,  floating  along  home. 
Only — only,  I  wish  it  was  to  our  home,  Rodney,  instead  of  just 
mine." 

"You  darling!"  he  said.  And,  presently:  "I'll  tell  you 
what  we'll  do  to-morrow,  if  you'll  run  away  from  your  dress 
maker.  We'll  go  and  buy  a  car  for  ourselves.  It's  ridiculous 


RODNEY'S   EXPERIMENT  67 

I  didn't  get  one  long  ago.  Frederica's  always  been  at  me  to. 
You  see,  mother  wouldn't  have  anything  but  horses,  and  I 
sold  those,  of  course,  when  she  died.  I've  meant  to  get  a 
car,  but  I  just  never  got  round  to  it." 

A  small  disagreeable  voice,  hermetically  sealed  in  one  of 
the  remoter  caverns  of  him,  remarked  at  this  point  that  he 
was  a  liar.  A  motor-car,  it  pointed  out,  was  one  of  the  things 
he  had  always  denounced  as  a  part  of  the  useless  clutter  of 
existence  that  he  refused  to  be  embarrassed  with.  But  it 
didn't  speak  with  much  conviction. 

She  picked  up  his  hand  and  brushed  her  lips  softly  against 
the  palm  of  it.  "You're  so  wonderful  to  me,"  she  said.  "You 
give  me  so  much.  And  I — I  have  so  little  to  give  back.  And 
I  want  to — I  want  to  give  you  all  the  world."  And  then, 
suddenly,  she  put  her  bare  arm  around  his  neck,  drew  his  face 
to  hers  and  kissed  him. 

It  was  the  first  time  she  had  ever  begun  a  caress  like  that. 


AFTER  BREAKFAST 

FOR  their  honeymoon,  Martin  had  loaned  them  his  camp 
up  in  northern  Wisconsin — uncut  forest  mostly,  with  a  river 
and  a  lot  of  little  lakes  in  it.  .There  were  still  deer  and  bear 
to  be  shot  there,  there  was  wonderful  fishing,  and,  more  to  the 
point  in  the  present  instance,  as  fine  a  brand  of  solitude  as 
civilization  can  ask  to  lay  its  hands  on.  It  was  modified,  and 
mitigated  too,  by  a  backwoods  family — a  man  and  his  wife, 
a  daughter  or  two,  and  half  a  dozen  sons,  who  lived  there  the 
year  round,  of  course;  so  that  by  telegraphing  two  or  three 
days  in  advance,  you  could  be  met  by  a  buckboard  at  the  near 
est  railroad  station  for  the  twenty-five-mile  drive  over  to  the 
camp.  You  could  find  the  house  itself  (a  huge  affair,  deco 
rously  built  of  logs,  as  far  as  its  exterior  manifestations  went, 
but  amply  supplied  on  the  interior  with  bathrooms,  real  beds 
and  so  forth)  opened  and  warmed  and  flavored  with  the  odor 
of  fried  venison  steak.  Also,  there  was  always  a  boy  to  pad 
dle  a  canoe  for  you,  or  saddle  a  horse,  if  you  didn't  feel  like 
doing  it  for  yourself. 

Eodney  and  Eose  spent  a  night  in  this  establishment,  then 
rigged  up  an  outfit  for  camping  of  a  less  symbolistic  sort,  and 
repaired  to  an  island  out  in  the  lake,  where  for  two  weeks 
they  lived  gorgeously,  like  the  savages  they  both,  to  a  very 
considerable  extent,  really  were. 

But,  at  the  end  of  this  fortnight,  a  whipping  north  wind, 
with  a  fine  penetrating  rain  in  its  teeth,  settled  down  for  a 
three-days'  visit,  and  drove  them  back  to  adequate  shelter. 
One  rainy  day  in  an  outdoor  camp  is  a  good  thing;  a  second 
requires  fortitude;  a  third  carries  the  conviction  that  it  has 
been  raining  from  the  first  day  of  Creation  and  will  keep  on 
till  the  Last  Judgment,  and  if  you  have  anywhere  to  go  to 
get  dry,  you  do. 

58 


AFTEK   BREAKFAST  59 

Of  course  the  storm  blew  itself  away  when  it  had  accom 
plished  its  purpose  of  driving  them  from  their  island  para 
dise,  but  they  didn't  go  back  to  it.  Two  weeks  of  camp-fires, 
hemlock  boughs  and  blankets,  had  given  them  an  appreciation 
for  sleeping  between  smooth  sheets,  and  coming  down  to  a 
breakfast  that  was  prepared  for  them.  And  one  morning 
Eose  came  into  the  big  living-room  to  find  Rodney  lounging 
there,  in  front  of  the  fire,  with  a  book. 

It  wasn't  the  first  time  he  had  done  that.  But  always  be 
fore,  on  seeing  her  come  in,  he  had  chucked  the  book  away 
and  come  to  meet  her.  This  time,  he  went  on  reading. 

She  moved  over  toward  him,  meaning  to  sit  down  on  the 
arm  of  his  chair,  cuddle  her  arm  around  his  neck,  and  at  the 
same  time,  discover  what  it  was  that  so  absorbed  him.  But 
half-way  across  the  room,  she  changed  her  mind.  He  hadn't 
even  reached  out  an  unconscious  hand  toward  her.  He  went 
on  reading  as  if,  actually,  he  were  alone  in  the  room.  Evi 
dently,  too,  it  was  a  book  he'd  brought  with  him — a  formida 
ble-looking  volume  printed  in  German — she  got  near  enough 
to  see  that.  So  she  picked  up  an  old  magazine  from  the  table, 
and  found  a  chair  of  her  own,  smiling  a  little  in  anticipation 
of  the  effect  this  maneuver  Avould  have. 

She  opened  the  magazine  at  random,  and,  presently,  for 
the  sake  of  verisimilitude,  turned  a  page.  Rodney  was  turn 
ing  pages  as  regularly  as  clockwork.  It  was  a  silly  magazine ! 
She  wished  she'd  found  something  that  really  could  interest 
her.  It  was  getting  harder  and  harder  to  sit  still.  He  couldn't 
be  angry  about  anything,  could  he?  No,  that  was  absurd. 
There  hadn't  been  the  slightest  trace  of  a  disagreement  be 
tween  them.  She  wouldn't  go  on  pretending  to  read,  anyhow, 
and  she  tossed  the  magazine  away. 

She  had  meant  it  to  fall  back  on  the  table.  But  she  put 
more  nervous  force  than  she  realized  into  the  toss,  so  that  it 
skittered  across  the  table  and  fell  on  the  floor  with  a  slap. 

That  roused  him.  He  closed  his  book — on  his  finger, 
though — looked  around  at  her,  stretched  his  arms  and  smiled. 
"Isn't  this  great  ?"  he  said. 

It  wasn't  a  sentiment  she  could  echo  quite  whole-heartedly 


60  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

just  then,  so  she  asked  him  what  he  meant — wasn't  what 
great. 

"Oh,  this,"  he  told  her.    "Being  like  this." 

"Sitting  half  a  mile  apart  this  way,"  she  asked,  "each  of 
us  reading  our  own  book?" 

She  didn't  realize  how  completely  provocative  her  meaning 
was,  until,  to  her  incredulous  bewilderment,  he  said  enthusi 
astically,  "Yes !  exactly !" 

He  wasn't  looking  at  her  now,  but  into  the  fire,  and  he 
rummaged  for  a  match  and  relighted  his  pipe  before  he  said 
anything  more.  "Being  permanent,  you  know,"  he  explained, 
"and — well,  our  real  selves  again." 

She  tried  hard  to  keep  her  voice  even  when  she  asked, 
"But — but  what  have  we  been?" 

And  at  that  he  laughed  out.  "Good  heavens,  what  haven't 
we  been !  A  couple  of  transfigured  lunatics.  Why,  Rose,  I 
haven't  been  able  to  see  straight,  or  think  straight,  for  the 
last  six  weeks.  And  I  don't  believe  you  have  either.  My 
ideas  have  just  been  running  in  circles  around  you.  How  I 
ever  got  through  those  last  two  cases  in  the  Appellate  Court, 
I  don't  see.  When  I  made  an  argument  before  the  bench,  I 
was — talking  to  you.  When  I  wrote  my  briefs,  I  was  writing 
you  love-letters.  And  if  I'd  had  sense  enough  to  realize  my 
condition,  I'd  have  been  frightened  to  death.  But  now — 
well,  we've  been  sitting  here  reading  away  for  an  hour,  without 
having  an  idea  of  each  other  in  our  heads." 

By  a  miracle  of  self-command,  she  managed  to  keep  con 
trol  of  her  voice.  "Yes,"  she  said.  "That — that  other's  all 
over,  isn't  it?" 

"I  wouldn't  go  so  far  as  to  say  that,"  he  demurred  around 
a  comfortable  yawn.  "I  expect  it  will  catch  us  again  every 
now  and  then.  But,  in  the  main,  we're  sane  people,  ready  to 
go  on  with  our  own  business.  What  was  it  you  were  reading  ?" 

"I  don't  believe  I'll  read  any  more  just  now,"  she  said.  "I 
think  I'll  go  out  for  a  walk."  And  she  managed  to  get  out 
side  the  room  without  his  discovering  that  anything  was 
wrong. 

It  was,  indeed,  her  first  preoccupation,  to  make  sure  he 


AFTER   BKEAKFAST  61 

shouldn't  discover  the  effect  his  words  had  had  on  her — to  get 
far  enough  away  before  the  storm  broke  so  that  she  could  have 
it  out  by  herself.  The  crowning  humiliation  would  be  if  he 
came  blundering  in  on  her  and  asked  her  what  was  the  matter. 

She  fled  down  the  trail  to  the  little  lake,  ran  out  a  canoe, 
caught  up  a  paddle  and  bent  a  feverish  energy  to  the  task  of 
getting  safely  around  into  the  shelter  of  a  fir-grown  point 
before  she  let  herself  stop,  as  she  would  have  said,  to  think. 
It  wasn't  really  to  think,  of  course.  Not,  that  is,  to  interpret 
out  to  the  end  of  all  its  logical  implications,  the  admission  he 
had  so  unconsciously  made  to  her  that  morning. 

She  had  never  seriously  been  hurt  or  frightened,  Portia  had 
said  weeks  ago.  And  when  she  said  it,  it  was  true.  She  was 
both  hurt  and  frightened  now,  and  the  instinct  that  had  urged 
her  to  fly  was  as  simple  and  primitive  as  that  which  urges 
a  wounded  animal  to  hide. 

Indeed,  if  you  could  have  seen  her  after  she  had  swung 
her  paddle  inboard,  sitting  there,  gripping  the  gunwales  with 
both  hands,  panting,  her  wide  eyes  dry,  you  might  easily  have 
thought  of  some  defenseless  wild  thing  cowering  in  a  mo 
mentary  shelter,  listening  for  the  baying  of  pursuing  hounds. 

He  didn't  love  her  any  more,  that  was  what  he  had  said. 
For  what  was  the  thing  he  had  so  cheerfully  described  him 
self  as  cured  of,  what  were  the  symptoms  he  had  enumerated 
as  if  he  had  been  talking  about  a  disease — the  obsession  with 
her,  the  inability  to  get  her  further  away  than  the  middle 
ground  of  his  thoughts,  and  then  only  temporarily ;  the  neces 
sity  of  saying  everything  he  said  and  doing  everything  he 
did,  with  reference  to  her ;  the  fact  that  his  mind  could  focus 
itself  sharp ]y  on  nothing  in  the  world  but  just  herself? — 
"What  was  all  that  but  the  veritable  description,  though  in 
hostile  terms,  of  the  love  he  had  promised  to  feel  for  her  till 
death  should — part  them;  of  the  very  love  she  felt  for  him, 
this  moment  stronger  than  ever? 

Eecurrent  waves  of  the  panic  broke  over  her,  during  which 
she  would  catch  up  her  paddle  again  and  drive  ahead,  blindly, 
without  any  conscious  knowledge  of  where  she  was  going. 
And  in  the  intervals,  she  drifted. 


63  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

The  relief  of  tears  didn't  come  to  her  until  she  saw,  just 
ahead,  the  island  where,  for  two  paradisiacal  weeks,  she  and 
Eodney  had  made  their  camp.  Here  she  beached  her  canoe 
and  went  ashore;  crept  into  a  little  natural  shelter  under  a 
jutting  rock,  where  they  had  lain  one  day  while,  for  three 
hours,  a  violent  unheralded  storm  had  whipped  the  lake  to 
lather.  The  heap  of  hemlock  branches  he  had  cut  for  a  couch 
for  them  was  still  there. 

At  the  end  of  half  an  hour,  she  observed  with  a  sort  of 
apathetic  satisfaction,  that  the  weather  conditions  of  their 
former  visit  were  going  to  be  repeated  now — a  sudden  dark 
ness,  a  shriek  of  wind,  a  wild  squall  flashing  across  the  sur 
face  of  the  little  lake,  and  a  driving  rain  so  thick  that  small 
as  the  lake  was,  it  veiled  the  shore  of  it. 

She  watched  it  for  an  hour  before  it  occurred  to  her  to 
wonder  what  Eodney  would  be  doing — whether  he'd  have  dis 
covered  her  absence  from  the  house  and  begun  to  worry  about 
her.  She  told  herself  that  he  wouldn't — that  he'd  sit  there 
until  he  finished  his  book,  or  until  they  called  him  for  lunch, 
without,  as  he  himself  had  boasted  that  morning,  a  thought  of 
her  entering  his  mind. 

She  wept  again  over  this  notion,  luxuriating  rather,  it  must 
be  confessed,  in  the  pathos  of  it,  until  she  caught  herself  in 
the  act  and,  disgustedly,  dried  her  eyes.  Of  course  he'd  worry 
about  her.  Only  there  was  nothing  either  of  them  could  do 
about  it  until  the  storm  should  be  over ;  then  she'd  paddle  back 
to  the  house  as  fast  as  she  could  and  set  his  mind  at  rest. 

Suddenly  she  sat  erect,  looked,  rubbed  her  eyes,  looked 
again,  then  sprang  to  her  feet  and  went  out  into  the  driving 
rain.  A  spot  of  white,  a  larger  one  of  black,  two  moving  pin 
points  of.  light,  was  what  she  saw.  The  white  was  Eodney's 
shirt,  the  black  the  canoe,  the  pin-points  the  reflection  from 
the  two-bladed  paddle  as,  recklessly,  he  forced  his  way  with 
it  into  the  teeth  of  the  storm.  He  wanted  her,  after  all. 

So,  with  a  racing  heart  and  flushed  cheeks,  she  watched 
him.  It  was  not  until  he  had  come  much  nearer  that  she 
went  white  with  the  realization  of  his  danger — not  until  she 
could  see  how  desperately  it  needed  all  his  strength  and  skill 


AFTER    BREAKFAST  63 

to  keep  his  little  cockle-shell  from  broaching  to  and  being 
swamped. 

She  went  as  far  to  meet  him  as  she  could — out  to  the  end 
of  the  point,  and  then  actually  into  the  water  to  help  him 
with  the  half-filled  boat. 

They  emptied  it  and  hauled  it  up  on  the  beach.  Then, 
looking  up  at  him  a  little  tremulously,  between  a  smile  and 
tears,  she  saw  how  white  he  was,  caught  him  in  her  arms  and 
felt  how  he  was  trembling. 

"I  thought  you  were  gone,"  he  said,  but  couldn't  manage . 
any  more  than  that  because  of  a  great  shuddering  sob  that 
stopped  him. 

"Don't !"  she  cried.  "Don't.— Oh,  my  dear !  I  didn't  know !" 

Presently,  back  in  the  shelter  again,  she  drew  his  head  down 
on  her  breast  and  held  him  tight. 

Logically,  of  course,  tho  situation  wasn't  essentially 
changed.  It  couldn't  be  a  part  of  their  daily  married  routine 
that  he  should  think  he'd  lost  her  and  come  through  perils 
to  the  rescue.  When  the  storm  had  blown  over  and  they'd 
come  back  to  the  house — still  more,  when  after  another  few 
weeks  they'd  gone  back  to  town,  he'd  still  have  a  world  of  his 
own  to  withdraw  into,  a  business  of  his  own  to  absorb  him, 
and  she,  with  no  world  at  all  except  the  one  he  was  the  prin 
cipal  inhabitant  of,  would  be  left  outside.  But  you  couldn't 
have  expected  her  to  think  of  that  while  she  held  him,  quiver 
ing,  in  her  arms. 


BOOK  TWO 
Love  and  the  World 


CHAPTEE  I 

THE   PEINCESS   CINDERELLA 

WHEN  the  society  editor  of  "America's  foremost  news 
paper,"  as  in  its  trademark  it  proclaims  itself  to  be,  an 
nounced  that  the  Rodney  Aldriches  had  taken  the  Allison 
McCraes'  house,  furnished,  for  a  year,  beginning  in  October, 
she  spoke  of  it  as  an  ideal  arrangement.  As  everybody  knew, 
it  was  an  ideal  house  for  a  young  married  couple,  and  it  was 
equally  evident  that  the  Rodney  Aldriches  were  an  ideal 
couple  for  it. 

In  the  sense  that  it  left  nothing  to  further  realization,  it 
was  an  ideal  house ;  an  old  house  in  the  Chicago  sense,  built 
over  into  something  very  much  older  still — Tudor,  perhaps — 
Jacobean,  anyway — by  a  smart  young  society  architect  who 
wore  soft  collars  and  an  uptwisted  mustache,  and  who,  by  a 
perfectly  reciprocal  arrangement  which  almost  deserves  to  be 
called  a  form  of  perpetual  motion,  owed  the  fact  that  he  was 
an  architect  to  his  social  position,  and  maintained  his  social 
position  by  being  an  architect. 

He  had  cooperated  enthusiastically  with  Florence  McCrae, 
not  only  in  the  design  of  the  house,  but  in  the  supplementary 
matters  of  furniture,  hangings,  rugs  and  pictures,  with  the 
effect  that  the  establishment  presented  the  last  politely  spoken 
word  in  things  as  they  ought  to  be.  The  period  furniture  was 
accurate  almost  to  the  minute,  and  the  arrangement  of  it, 
the  color  schemes  and  the  lighting,  had  at  once  the  finality  of 
perfection  and  the  perfection  of  finality.  If  you  happened 
to  like  that  sort  of  thing,  it  was  precisely  the  sort  of  thing 
you'd  like. 

The  same  sort  of  neat,  fully  acquired  perfection  character 
ized  the  McCraes'  domestic  arrangements.  Allison  McCrae's 
income,  combined  with  his  wife's,  was  exactly  enough  to  en- 

67 


68  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

able  them  to  live  in  this  house  and  entertain  on  the  scale  it 
very  definitely  prescribed,  just  half  the  time.  Every  other  year 
they  went  off  around  the  world  in  one  direction  or  another, 
and  rented  their  house  furnished  for  exactly  enough  to  pay  all 
their  expenses.  They  had  no  children,  and  his  business,  which 
consisted  in  allowing  his  bank  to  collect  his  invariable  quar 
terly  dividends  for  him  and  credit  them  to  his  account,  of 
fered  no  obstacle  to  this  arrangement.  On  the  alternate  years, 
they  came  back  and  spent  two  years'  income  living  in  their 
house. 

Florence  was  an  old  friend  of  Rodney's  and  it  was  her  no 
tion  that  it  would  be  just  the  thing  he'd  want.  She  made  no 
professions  of  altruism — admitted  she  was  fussy  about  whom 
she  rented  her  darling  house  to,  and  that  Rodney  and  his  wife 
would  be  exactly  right.  Still,  she  didn't  believe  he  could 
do  better.  They'd  have  to  have  some  sort  of  place  to  live  in, 
in  the  autumn.  It  would  be  such  a  mistake  to  buy  a  lot  of 
stuff  in  a  hurry  and  find  out  later  that  they  didn't  want  it! 
The  arrangement  she  proposed  would  leave  him  an  idyllically 
untroubled  summer  —  nothing  to  fuss  about,  and  provide 
.  .  .  Well,  Rodney  knew  for  himself  what  the  house  was — 
complete  down  to  the  cork-screws. 

Even  the  servant  question  was  eliminated.  "Ours  are  so 
good,"  Florence  said,  "that  the  last  time  we  rented  the  house, 
we  put  them  in  the  lease.  I  wouldn't  do  that  with  you,  of 
course,  but  I  know  they'll  be  just  what  you  want."  And  six 
thousand  dollars  a  year  was  simply  dirt  cheap. 

To  clinch  the  thing,  Florence  went  around  and  saw  Fred- 
erica  about  it.  And  Frederica,  after  listening,  non-com- 
mittally,  dashed  off  to  the  last  meeting  of  the  Thursday  Club 
(all  this  happened  in  June,  just  before  the  wedding)  and 
talked  the  matter  over  with  Violet  Williamson  on  the  way 
home,  afterward. 

"John  said  once,"  observed  Violet,  "that  if  he  had  to  live 
in  that  house,  he'd  either  go  out  and  buy  a  plush  Morris  chair 
from  feather-your-nest  Saltzman's,  and  a  golden  oak  side 
board,  or  else  run  amuck." 

Frederica  grinned,  but  was  sure  it  wouldn't  affect  Rodney 


THE    PBINCBSS   CINDERELLA  69 

that  way.  He'd  never  notice  that  there  wasn't  a  golden  oak 
sideboard  with  a  beveled  mirror  in  it.  As  for  Rose,  she 
thought  Rose  would  like  it — for  a  while,  anyway.  Of  course 
it  wasn't  forever.  But  this  wasn't  the  point.  It  was  some 
thing  else  she  had  to  get  an  unprejudiced  opinion  on,  "simply 
because  in  this  case  my  own  isn't  trustworthy.  I'm  so  foolish 
about  old  Roddy,  that  I  can't  be  sure  I  haven't — well,  caught 
being  mad  about  Rose  from  him.  It  all  depends,  you  see,  on 
whether  Rose  is  going  to  be  a  hit  this  winter  or  not.  If  she  is, 
they'll  want  a  place  just  like  that  and  it  would  be  a  shame  for 
her  to  be  bothered  and  unsettled  when  she  might  have  every 
thing  all  oiled  for  her.  But  of  course  if  she  doesn't — go  (and 
it  all  depends  on  her;  Rodney  won't  be  much  help) — why, 
having  a  house  like  that  might  be  pretty  sad.  So,  if  you're  a 
true  friend,  you'll  tell  me  what  you  think." 

"What  I  really  think,"  said  Violet,  " — of  course  I  suppose 
I'd  say  this  anyway,  but  I  do  honestly  mean  it — is  that  she'll 
be  what  John  calls  a  'knock-out.'  To  be  sure,  I've  only  met 
her  twice,  but  I  think  she's  absolutely  thrilling.  She's  so  per 
fectly  simple.  She's  never — don't  you  know — being  anything. 
She  just  is.  And  she  thinks  we're  all  so  wonderful — clever 
and  witty  and  beautiful  and  all  that — just  honestly  thinks 
so,  that  she'll  make  everybody  feel  warm  and  nice  inside,  and 
they'll  be  sure  to  like  her.  Of  course,  when  she  gets  over 
feeling  that  way  about  us  .  .  ." 

"She's  got  a  real  eye  for  clothes,  too,"  said  Frederica. 
"We've  been  shopping.  Well  then,  I'm  going  to  tell  Rodney 
to  go  ahead  and  take  the  house." 

Rose  was  consulted  about  it  of  course,  though  consulted  is 
perhaps  not  the  right  word  to  use.  She  was  taken  to  see  it, 
anyway,  and  asked  if  she  liked  it,  a  question  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  superfluous.  One  might  as  well  have  asked  Cin 
derella  if  she  liked  the  gown  the  fairy  godmother  had  pro 
vided  her  with  for  the  prince's  ball. 

It  didn't  occur  to  her  to  ask  how  much  the  rent  would  be, 
nor  would  the  fact  have  had  any  value  for  her  as  an  illuminant, 
because  she  would  have  had  no  idea  whether  six  thousand 
dollars  was  a  half  or  a  hundredth  of  her  future  husband's 


70  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

income.  The  new  house  was  just  a  part — as  so  many  of  the 
other  things  that  had  happened  to  her  since  that  night  when 
Rodney  had  sent  her  flowers  and  taken  her  to  the  theater  and 
two  restaurants  in  Martin's  biggest  limousine  had  been  parts 
— of  a  breath-arresting  fairy  story. 

It  takes  a  consciousness  of  resistance  overcome  to  make 
anything  feel  quite  real,  and  Rose,  during  the  first  three 
months  after  their  return  to  town  in  the  autumn,  encoun 
tered  no  resistance  whatever.  It  was  all,  as  Frederica  had 
said,  oiled.  She  was  asked  to  make  no  effort.  The  whole 
thing  just  happened,  exactly  as  it  had  happened  to  Cinderella. 
All  she  had  to  do  wras  to  watch  with  wonder-wide  eyes,  and 
feel  that  she  was,  deliciously,  being  floated  along. 

The  conclusion  Frederica  and  Violet  had  come  to  about 
her  chance  for  social  success  was  amply  justified  by  the  event, 
and  it  is  probable  that  Violet  had  put  her  finger  on  the  main 
spring  of  it.  One  needn't  assume  that  there  were  not  other 
young  women  at  the  prince's  ball  as  beautiful  as  Cinderella, 
and  other  gowns,  perhaps,  as  marvelous  as  the  one  provided 
by  the  fairy  godmother.  The  godmother's  greatest  gift,  I 
should  say,  though  the  fable  lays  little  stress  on  it,  was  a 
capacity  for  unalloyed  delight.  No  other  young  girl,  beautiful 
as  she  may  have  been,  if  she  were  accustomed  to  driving  to 
balls  in  coaches  and  having  princes  ask  her  to  dance  with 
them,  could  possibly  have  looked  at  that  prince  the  way  Cin 
derella  must  have  looked  at  him. 

While  a  sophisticated  woman  can  affect  this  sort  of  sim 
plicity  well  enough  to  take  in  the  men,  the  affectation  is  al 
ways  transparently  clear  to  other  women  and  they  detest  her 
for  it.  But  it  was  altogether  the  real  thing  with  Rose,  and 
they  knew  it  and  took  to  her  as  naturally  as  the  men  did. 

So  it  fell  out  that  what  with  the  Junior  League,  the 
woman's  auxiliary  boards  of  one  or  two  of  the  more  respect 
ably  elect  charities,  the  Thursday  Club  and  The  Whifflers 
(this  was  the  smallest  and  smartest  organization  of  the  lot — 
fifteen  or  twenty  young  women  supposed  to  combine  and 
reconcile  social  and  intellectual  brilliancy  on  even  terms. 
They  met  at  one  another's  houses  and  read  scintillating  papers 


THE    PRINCESS   CINDERELLA  71 

about  nothing  whatever  under  titles  selected  generally  from 
Through  the  Looking -glass  or  The  Hunting  of  the  SnarJc)  — 
what  with  all  this,  her  days  were  quite  as  full  as  the  evenings 
were,  when  she  and  Rodney  dined  and  went  to  the  opera  and 
paid  fabulous  prices  to  queer  professionals,  to  keep  themselves 
abreast  of  the  minute  in  all  the  new  dances. 

But  it  wasn't  merely  the  events  of  this  sort,  sitting  in 
boxes  at  the  opera  and  going  to  marvelous  supper  dances 
afterward,  that  had  this  thrilling  quality  of  incredibility  to 
Rose.  The  connective  tissue  of  her  life  gave  her  the  same 
sensation,  perhaps  even  more  strongly. 

Portia  had  been  quite  right  in  saying  that  she  had  never  had 
to  do  anything;  the  rallying  of  all  her  forces  under  the  spur 
of  necessity  was  an  experience  she  had  never  undergone.  And 
it  was  also  true  that  her  mother,  and  for  that  matter,  Portia 
herself  had  spoiled  her  a  lot — had  run  about  doing  little 
things  for  her,  come  in  and  shut  down  her  windows  in  the 
morning,  and  opened  the  register,  and  on  any  sort  of  excuse, 
on  a  Saturday  morning,  for  example,  had  brought  her  her 
breakfast  on  a  tray. 

But  these  things  had  been  favors,  not  services — never  to 
be  asked  for,  of  course,  and  always  to  be  accepted  a  little 
apologetically.  She  never  knew  what  it  was  really  to  be 
served,  until  she  and  Rodney  came  back  from  their  camp  in 
the  woods.  The  whole  mechanism  of  ringing  bells  for  people, 
telling  them,  quite  courteously  of  course,  but  with  no  spare 
words,  precisely  what  she  wanted  them  to  do  and  seeing  them, 
with  no  words  at  all  of  their  own,  except  the  barest  minimum 
required  to  indicate  respectful  acquiescence — carrying  out 
these  instructions,  was  in  its  novelty,  as  sensuously  delightful 
a  thing  to  her  feelings  as  the  contact  with  a  fine  fabric  was 
to  her  finger-tips. 

"I  haven't,"  Rose,  in  bed,  told  Rodney  one  morning,  "a 
single,  blessed,  mortal  thing  to  do  all  day."  Some  fixture 
scheduled  for  that  morning  had  been  moved,  she  went  on  to 
explain,  and  Eleanor  Randolph  was  feeling  seedy  and  had 
called  off  a  little  luncheon  and  matinee  party.  So,  she  con 
cluded  with  a  deep-drawn  sigh,  the  day  was  empty. 


72  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUBE 

"Oh,  that's  too  bad/'  he  said  with  concern.  "Can't  you 
manage  something  .  .  .  ?" 

"Too  bad !"  said  Rose  in  lively  dissent.  "It's  too  heavenly ! 
I've  got  a  whole  day  just  to  enjoy  being  myself; — being" — 
she  reached  across  to  the  other  bed  for  his  hand,  and  getting 
it,  stroked  her  cheek  with  it — "being  my  new  self.  You've 
no  idea  how  new  it  is,  or  how  exciting  all  the  little  things 
about  it  are.  State  Street's  so  different  now — going  and 
getting  the  exact  thing  I  want,  instead  of  finding  something 
I  can  make  do,  and  then  faking  it  up  to  look  as  much  like 
the  real  thing  as  I  could.  Portia  used  to  think  I  faked  pretty 
well.  It  was  the  one  thing  she  really  admired  about  me,  be 
cause  she  couldn't  do  it  herself  at  all.  But  I  never  was — 
don't  you  know? — right. 

"And  then  when  I  was  going  anywhere,  I'd  figure  out  the 
through  routes  and  where  I'd  take  transfers,  and  how  many 
blocks  I'd  have  to  walk,  and  what  kind  of  shoes  I'd  have  to 
wear.  And  coming  home  in  time  for  dinner  always  meant 
the  rush  hour,  and  I'd  have  to  stand.  And  it  simply  never  oc 
curred  to  me  that  everybody  else  didn't  do  it  that  way.  Ex 
cept" — she  smiled — "except  in  Eobert  Chambers'  novels  and 
such." 

It  wasn't  necessary  to  see  Eose  smile  to  know  she  did  it. 
Her  voice,  broadening  out  and — dimpling,  betrayed  the  fact. 
This  smile,  plainly  enough,  went  rather  below  the  surface, 
carried  a  reference  to  something.     But  Eodney  didn't  inter- . 
rupt.    He  let  her  go  on  and  waited  to  inquire  about  it  later. 

"So  you  see,"  she  concluded,  "it's  quite  an  adventure  just 
to  say — well,  that  I  want  the  car  at  a  quarter  to  eleven  and 
to  tell  Otto  exactly  where  I  want  him  to  drive  me  to.  I  al 
ways  feel  as  if  I  ought  to  say  that  if  he'll  just  stop  the  car 
at  the  corner  of  Diversey  Street,  I  can  walk." 

He  laughed  out  at  that  and  asked  her  how  long  she  thought 
this  blissful  state  of  things  would  last. 

"Forever,"  she  said. 

But  presently  she  propped  herself  up  on  one  elbow  and 
looked  over  at  him  rather  thoughtfully.  "Of  course  it's  none 
of  it  new  to  you,"  she  said — "not  the  silly  little  things  I've 


THE    PRINCESS   CINDERELLA  73 

been  talking  about,  nor  the  things  we  do  together — oh,  the 
dinners,  and  the  dances,  and  the  operas.  Do  you  sort  of — 
wish  I'd  get  tired  of  it  ?  Is  it  a  dreadful  bore  to  you  ?" 

"So  long  as  it  doesn't  bore  you,"  he  said ;  "so  long  as  you 
go  on — shining  the  way  you  do  over  it,  and  I  am  where  I 
can  see  you  shine" — he  got  out  of  his  bed,  sat  down  on  the 
edge  of  hers,  and  took  both  her  hands — "so  long  as  it's  like 
that,  you  wonder,"  he  said,  "well,  the  dinners  and  the  operas 
and  all  that  may  be  piffle,  but  I  shall  be  blind  to  the  fact." 

She  kissed  his  hands  and  told  him  contentedly  that  he  was 
a  darling.  But,  after  a  moment's  silence,  a  little  frown 
puckered  her  eyebrows  and  she  asked  him  what  he  was  so 
solemn  about. 

Well,  he  had  told  her  the  truth.  The  edge  of  excitement  in 
his  voice  would  have  carried  the  irresistible  conviction  to  any 
body,  that  the  thing  he  had  said  was,  without  reserve,  the  very 
thing  he  meant.  But  precisely  as  he  said  it,  as  if,  indeed,  the 
thing  that  he  had  said  were  the  detonating  charge  that  fires 
the  shell,  he  felt  the  impact,  away  down  in  the  inner  depths  of 
him,  of  a  realization  that  he  was  not  the  same  man  he  had 
been  six  months  ago.  Not  the  man  who  had  tramped  impa 
tiently  back  and  forth  across  Frederica's  drawing-room,  ex 
pounding  his  ideals  of  space  and  leisure — open,  wind-swept 
space,  for  the  free  range  of  a  hard,  clean,  athletic  mind.  Not 
the  man  who  despised  the  clutter  of  expensive  junk — "so 
many  things  to  have  and  to  do,  that  one  couldn't  turn  around 
for  fear  of  breaking  something."  That  man  would  have  de 
rided  the  possibility  that  he  could  ever  say  this  thing  that  he, 
still  Rodney  Aldrich,  had  just  said  to  Rose — and  meant. 

To  that  man,  the  priceless  hour  of  the  day  had  always  been 
precisely  this  one,  the  first  waking  hour,  when  his  mind,  in 
the  enjoyment  of  a  sort  of  clairvoyant  limpidity,  had  been 
wont  to  challenge  its  stiffest  problems,  wrestle  with  them,  and 
whether  triumphant  or  not,  despatch  him  to  his  office  avid 
for  the  day's  work  and  strides  ahead  of  where  he  had  left  it 
the  night  before. 

He  spent  that  hour  very  differently  now.  He  spent  all  his 
hours,  even  the  formal  working  ones,  differently.  And  the 


74  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

terrifying  thing  was  that  he  hadn't  resisted  the  change,  hadn't 
wanted  to  resist,  didn't  want  to  now,  as  he  sat  there  looking 
down  at  her — at  the  wonderful  hair  which  framed  her  face 
and,  in  its  two  thick  braids,  the  incomparable  whiteness  of 
her  throat  and  bosom — at  the  slumberous  glory  of  her  eyes. 

So,  when  she  asked  him  what  he  was  looking  so  solemn 
about,  he  said  with  more  truth  than  he  pretended  to  himself, 
that  it  was  enough  to  make  anybody  solemn  to  look  at  her. 
And  then,  to  break  the  spell,  he  asked  her  why  she  had 
laughed  a  little  while  back,  over  something  she  had  said  about 
Robert  TV.  Chambers'  novels. 

"I  was  thinking,"  she  said,  "of  the  awful  disgrace  I  got 
into  yesterday,  with  somebody — well,  with  Bertram  Willis, 
by  saying  something  like  that.  I'll  have  to  tell  you  about  it." 

Bertram  Willis,  it  should  be  said,  was  the  young  architect 
with  the  upturned  mustaches  and  the  soft  Byronic  collars,  who 
had  done  the  house  for  the  McCraes.  And  I  must  warn  you 
to  take  the  adjective  }*oung,  with  a  grain  of  salt.  Youth  was 
no  mere  accident  with  him.  He  made  an  art  of  it,  just  as 
he  did  of  eating  and  drinking  and  love-making  and,  inci 
dentally,  architecture.  He  was  enormously  in  demand,  chiefly 
perhaps,  among  young  married  women  whose  respectability 
and  social  position  were  alike  beyond  cavil.  He  never  car 
ried  anything  too  far,  you  see.  He  was  no  pirate — a  sort, 
rather,  of  licensed  privateer.  And  what  made  him  so  in 
vincibly  attractive — after  you  had  granted  his  other  qualities, 
that  is — was  that  he  professed  himself,  among  women,  exceed 
ingly  difficult  to  please,  so  that  attentions  from  him,  even  of 
a  casual  sort,  became  ex  hypothesi  compliments  of  the  first 
order.  If  he  asked  you,  in  his  innocently  shameless  way,  to 
belong  to  his  liareem,  you  boasted  of  it  afterward ; — jocularly, 
to  be  sure,  but  you  felt  pleased  just  the  same.  The  thing 
that  had  given  the  final  cachet  of  distinction  to  Rose's  social 
success  that  season,  had  been  the  fact  that  he  had  shown  a, 
disposition  to  flirt  with  her  quite  furiously. 

Rose  didn't  need  to  tell  her  husband  that,  of  course,  be 
cause  he  knew  it  already,  as  he  also  knew  that  Willis  had 
asked  her  to  be  one  of  the  Watteau  group  he  was  getting  up 


THE   PRINCESS   CINDERELLA  75 

for  the  charity  ball  (the  ball  was  to  be  a  sumptuously  pic 
turesque  affair  that  year),  nor  that  he  had  been  spending 
hours  with  her  over  the  question  of  costumes — getting  as  good 
as  he  gave,  too,  because  her  eye  for  clothes  amounted  to  a 
really  special  talent. 

All  that  Rodney  didn't  know,  was  about  the  conversation 
the  two  of  them  had  had  yesterday  afternoon  at  tea-time. 

Rose,  intent  on  telling  him  all  about  it,  had  postponed  the 
recital  while  she  made  up  her  own  mind  as  to  how  she  should 
regard  the  thing  herself;  whether  she  ought  to  have  been 
annoyed,  or  seriously  remonstrant,  or  whether  the  smile  of 
pure  amusement  which  had  come  so  spontaneously  to  her  lips, 
had  expressed,  after  all,  an  adequate  emotion. 

The  look  in  her  husband's  face  made  an  end  of  all  doubts, 
reduced  the  episode  of  yesterday  to  its  proper  scale.  Married 
to  a  man  who  could  look  at  her  like  that,  she  needn't  take 
any  one  else's  looks  or  speeches  very  seriously.  It  was  at  this 
angle  that  she  told  about  it. 

"Why,"  she  said,  "of  course  he's  alwa}rs  talked  to  me  as  if 
I  were  about  six — sixteen,  anyway,  no  older  than  that,  and 
the  names  he  makes  up  to  call  me  are  simply  too  silly  to  repeat. 
But  I  never  paid  any  attention,  because — well,  everybody 
knows  he's  that  way  to  everybody.  'Flower  face'  was  one  of  his 
favorites,  but  there  were  others  that  were  worse.  Well,  yes 
terday  he  brought  around  some  old  costume  plates,  but  he 
wouldn't  let  me  look  at  them  without  coming  round  beside 
me  and — holding  my  hand,  so  that  didn't  work  very  well. 
And  then  he  got  quite  solemn  and  said  I'd — given  him  the 
only  real  regret  of  his  life,  because  he  hadn't  seen  me  until 
it  was  too  late." 

"I  didn't  know,"  said  Rodney,  "that  he  ever  let  obstacles 
like  husbands  bother  him." 

"That's  what  I  thought  he  meant  at  first,"  said  Rose,  "but 
it  wasn't.  He  didn't  mean  it  was  too  late  because  of  my  being 
married  to  you.  He  meant  too  late  because  of  him.  He 
couldn't  love  me,  he  said,  as  I  deserved,  because  he'd  been  in 
love  so  many  times  before,  himself. 

"And  then,  of  course,  just  when  I  should  have  been  looking 


76  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

awfully  sad  and  sympathetic,  I  had  to  go  and  grin,  and  he 
wanted  to  know  why,  and  I  said,  'Nothing/  but  he  insisted, 
you  know,  so  then  I  told  him. 

"Well,  it  was  just  what  I  said  to  you  a  while  ago — that  I 
didn't  know  any  men  ever  talked  like  that  except  in  books 
by  Hichens  or  Chambers — why  do  you  suppose  they're  both 
named  Kobert  ? — and  he  went  perfectly  purple  with  rage  and 
said  I  was  a  savage.  And  then  he  got  madder  still  and  said 
he'd  like  to  be  a  savage  himself  for  about  five  minutes ;  and  I 
wanted  to  tell  him  to  go  ahead  and  try,  and  see  what  hap 
pened,  but  I  didn't.  I  asked  him  how  he  wanted  his  tea, 
and  he  didn't  want  it  at  all,  and  went  away." 

As  she  finished,  she  glanced  up  into  his  face  for  a  hardly- 
needed  reassurance  that  the  episode  looked  to  him,  as  it  had 
looked  to  her,  trivial.  Then,  with  a  contented  little  sigh,  for 
his  look  gave  her  just  what  she  wanted,  she  sat  up  and  slid 
her  arms  around  his  neck. 

"How  plumb  ridiculous  it  would  have  been,"  she  said,  "if 
either  of  us  had  married  anybody  else." 

If  Rodney,  that  is,  had  married  a  girl  who'd  have  taken 
Bertram  Willis  seriously ;  or  if  she  had  married  a  man  capable 
of  thinking  the  architect's  attentions  important. 


CHAPTEK  II 

THE   FIBST    QUESTION"   AXD   AN   ANSWER   TO   IT 

BUT  within  a  day  or  two,  when  a  conversation  overheard  at 
a  luncheon  table  recalled  the  architect  to  her  mind,  a  rather 
perplexing  question  propounded  itself  to  her.  Why  had  it 
infuriated  him  so — why  had  he  glared  at  her  with  that  air  of 
astounded  incredulity,  on  discovering  that  she  wasn't  pre 
pared  to  take  him  seriously  ?  There  could  be  only  one  answer 
to  that  question.  lie  could  not  have  expected  Eose  to  be 
properly  impressed  and  fluttered,  unless  that  were  the  effect 
he  was  in  the  habit  of  producing  on  other  women.  These 
others,  much  older  that  Eose  all  of  them  (because  no 
debutantes  were  ever  invited  to  belong  to  the  Tiareem},  these 
new,  brilliant,  sophisticated  friends  her  marriage  with  Eod- 
ney  had  brought  her,  did  not,  evidently,  regard  the  dapper 
little  architect  with  feelings  anything  like  the  mild,  faintly 
contemptuous  mirth  that  he  had  roused  so  spontaneously  and 
irresistibly  in  Eose.  Every  one  of  them  had  a  husband  of 
her  own,  hadn't  she?  And  they  were  happily  married,  too. 
Well,  then  .  .  . ! 

She  found  Violet  Williamson  in  Frederica's  box  at  the  Sym 
phony  concert  one  Friday  afternoon,  and  took  them  both  home 
to  tea  with  her  afterward.  And  when  the  talk  fairly  got 
going,  she  tossed  her  problem  about  Bertie  Willis  and  his 
hareem  into  the  vortex  to  see  what  would  come  of  it. 

It  was  always  easy  to  talk  with  Frederica  and  Violet,  there 
was  so  much  real  affection  under  the  amusement  they  freely 
expressed  over  her  youth  and  inexperience  and  simplicity. 
They  always  laughed  at  her,  but  they  came  over  and  hugged 
her  afterward. 

"I'm  turned  out  of  the  liareem,"  she  said,  apropos  of  the 
mention  of  him,  "in  disgrace." 

Violet  wanted  to  know  whatever  in  the  world  she  had  done 

77 


78  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

to  him.  "Because,  he's  been  positively — what  do  you  call  it  ? 
* — di  thy  ramble  about  you  for  the  last  three  months." 

"I  laughed/'  Eose  acknowledged;  "in  the  wrong  place  of 
course." 

The  two  older  women  exchanged  glances. 

"Do  you  suppose  it's  ever  been  done  to  him  before,"  asked 
Frederica,  "in  the  last  fifteen  years,  anyway?"  And  Violet 
solemnly  shook  her  head. 

"But  why?"  demanded  Rose.  "That's  what  I  want  to 
know.  How  can  any  one  help  thinking  he's  ridiculous.  Of 
course  if  you  were  alone  on  a  desert  island  with  him  like  the 
Bab  Ballad,  I  suppose  you'd  make  the  best  of  him.  But  with 
any  one  else  that  was — real,  you  know,  around  .  .  ." 

Only  a  very  high  vacuum — this  was  the  idea  Eose  seemed  to 
be  getting  at — might  be  expected,  faute  de  mieux,  to  tolerate 
Bertie.  So  if  you  found  him  tolerated  seriously  in  a  woman's 
life,  you  couldn't  resist  the  presumption  that  there  was  a 
vacuum  there. 

"Don't  ask  me  about  him,"  said  Frederica.  "He  never 
would  have  anything  to  do  with  me ;  said  I  was  a  classic  type 
and  they  always  bored  him  stiff.  But  Violet,  here  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Violet,  "I  lasted  one  season,  and  then  he 
dropped  me.  He  beat  me  to  it  by  about  a  minute.  All  the 
same — oh,  I  can  understand  it  well  enough.  You  see,  what 
he  builds  on  is  that  a  woman's  husband  is  always  the  least 
interesting  man  in  the  world.  Oh,  I  don't  mean  we  don't 
love  them,  or  that  we  want  to  change  them — permanently, 
you  know.  Take  Frederica  and  me.  We  wouldn't  exchange 
for  anything.  Yet,  we  used  to  have  long  arguments.  I've 
said  that  Martin  was  more — interesting,  witty,  you  know,  and 
all  that,  than  John.  And  Frederica  says  John  is  more  inter 
esting  than  Martin.  Oh,  just  to  talk  to,  I  mean.  Not  about 
anything  in  particular,  but  when  you  haven't  anything  else 
to  do." 

She  paused  long  enough  to  take  a  tentative  sip  or  two  of 
boiling  hot  tea.  But  the  way  she  had  hung  up  the  ending 
to  her  sentence,  told  them  she  wasn't  through  with  the  topic 

yet. 


,THE   FIRST    QUESTION  79 

"It's  funny  about  that,  too,"  she  went  on,  "because  really, 
we  see  each  other  so  much  and  have  known  each  other  so  long, 
that  I  know  Martin's — repertory,  about  as  well  as  Frederica. 
I  mean,  it  isn't  like  Walter  Mill,  when  he  was  just  back  from 
the  Legation  at  Pekin,  or  even  like  Jimmy  Wallace,  who 
spends  half  his  time  playing  around  with  all  sorts  of  impossi 
ble  people — chorus-girls  and  such,  and  tells  you  queer  stories 
about  them.  There's  something  besides  the — familiarness  that 
makes  husbands  dull.  And  that's  what  makes  Bertie  amusing." 

"Oh,  of  course,"  said  Frederica,  "everj'body  likes  to  flirt — 
whether  they  have  to  or  not." 

"Have  to  ?"  Eose  echoed.    She  didn't  want  to  miss  anything. 

Frederica  hesitated.  Then,  rather  tentatively,  began  her 
exegesis. 

'•'Why,  there  are  a  lot  of  women — especially  of  our  sort,  I 
suppose,  who  are  always  .  .  .  well,  it's  like  taking  your 
own  temperature — sticking  a  thermometer  into  their  mouths 
and  looking  at  it.  They  think  they  know  how  they  ought  to 
feel  about  certain  things,  and  they're  always  looking  to  see 
if  they  do.  And  when  they  don't,  they  think  their  emotional 
natures  are  being  starved,  or  some  silly  thing  like  that.  And 
of  course,  if  you're  that  way,  you're  always  trying  experi 
ments,  just  the  way  people  do  with  health  foods.  In  the  end, 
they  generally  settle  on  Bertie.  He's  perfectly  safe,  you  know 
— just  as  anxious  as  they  are  not  to  do  anything  really  out 
rageous.  Bertie  keeps  them  in  a  pleasant  sort  of  flutter,  and 
maybe  he  does  them  good.  I  don't  know. — Drink  your  tea, 
Violet.  We've  got  to  run." 

That  was  explicit  enough  anyway.  But  it  didn't  solve 
Rose's  problem — broadened  and  deepened  it  rather,  and  gave 
it  a  greater  basis  of  reality.  It  was  silly,  of  course,  always 
to  be  asking  yourself  questions.  But  after  all,  you  didn't 
question  a  thing  that  wasn't  questionable.  There  had  been  no 
necessity  for  a  compromise  between  romance  and  reality  in 
her  own  case.  She  hadn't  any  need  of  a  thermometer.  Why 
had  they? 

Of  course  she  knew  well  enough  that  marriage  was  not  al 
ways  the  blissful  transformation  it  had  been  for  her.  There 


80  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

were  unhappy  marriages.  There  were  such  things  in  the 
world  as  unfaithful  husbands  and  brutal  drunken  husbands, 
who  had  to  be  divorced.  And  equally,  too,  there  were  cold 
blooded,  designing,  mercenary  wives.  (In  the  back  of  her 
mind  was  the  unacknowledged  notion  that  these  people  existed 
generally  in  novels.  She  knew,  of  course,  that  those  char 
acters  must  have  real  prototypes  somewhere.  Only,  it  hadn't 
occurred  to  her  to  identify  them  with  people  of  her  own 
acquaintance.)  But  the  idea  had  been  that,  barring  these 
tragic  and  disastrous  types,  marriage  was  a  state  whose  happy 
satisfactoriness  could,  more  or  less,  be  taken  for  granted. 

Oh,  there  were  bumps  and  bruises,  of  course.  She  hadn't 
forgotten  that  tragic  hour  in  the  canoe  last  summer.  There 
had,  indeed,  been  two  or  three  minor  variants  on  the  same 
theme  since.  She  had  seen  Rodney  drop  off  now  and  again 
into  a  scowling  abstraction,  during  which  it  was  so  evident 
he  didn't  want  to  talk  to  her,  or  even  be  reminded  that  she 
was  about,  that  she  had  gone  away  flushed  and  wondering,  and 
needing  an  effort  to  hold  back  the  tears. 

These  weren't  frequent  occurrences,  though.  Once  settled 
into  what  apparently  was  going  to  be  their  winter's  routine, 
they  had  so  little  time  alone  together  that  these  moments,  when 
they  came,  had  almost  the  tension  of  those  that  unmarried 
lovers  enjoy.  They  were  something  to  look  forward  to  and 
make  the  delicious  utmost  of. 

So,  until  she  got  to  wondering  about  Bertie,  Rose's  instinc 
tive  attitude  toward  the  group  of  young  to  middle-aged  mar 
ried  people  into  which  her  own  marriage  had  introduced  her, 
was  founded  on  the  assumption  that,  allowing  for  occasional 
exceptions,  the  husbands  and  wives  felt  toward  each  other  as 
she  and  Rodney  did — were  held  together  by  the  same  irresisti 
ble,  unanalyzable  attraction,  could  remember  severally,  their 
vivid  intoxicating  hours,  just  as  she  remembered  the  hour 
when  Rodney  had  told  her  the  story  and  the  philosophy  of  his 
life. 

Bertie,  or  rather  the  demand  for  what  Bertie  supplied,  to 
gether  with  Frederica's  explanation  of  it,  brought  her  the 


THE   FIRST   QUESTION  81 

misgiving  that  marriage  was  not,  perhaps,  even  between  peo 
ple  who  loved  each  other, — between  husbands  who  were  not 
"unfaithful"  and  wives  who  were  not  "mercenary" — quite  so 
simple  as  it  seemed. 

The  misgiving  was  not  very  serious  at  first — half  amused, 
and  wholly  academic,  because  she  hadn't,  as  yet,  the  remotest 
notion  that  the  thing  concerned,  or  ever  could  concern,  her 
self;  but  the  point  was,  it  formed  a  nucleus,  and  the  property 
of  a  nucleus  is  that  it  has  the  power  of  attracting  to  itself 
particles  out  of  the  surrounding  nebulous  vapor.  It  grows  as 
it  attracts,  and  it  attracts  more  strongly  as  it  grows. 

An  illustration  of  this  principle  is  in  the  fact  that,  but  for 
the  misgiving,  she  would  hardly  have  asked  Simone  Greville 
what  she  meant  by  saying  that  though  she  had  always  sup 
posed  the  fundamental  sex  attraction  between  men  and 
women  to  be  the  same  in  its  essentials,  in  all  epochs  and  in  all 
civilizations,  her  acquaintance  with  upper-class  American 
women  was  leading  her  to  admit  a  possible  exception. 

Since  that  amiable  celestial,  Wu  Ting  Fang,  made  his  sur 
vey  of  our  western  civilization  and  left  us  wondering  whether 
after  all  we  had  the  right  name  for  it,  no  one  has  studied  our 
leisured  and  cultivated  classes  with  more  candor  and  pene 
tration  than  this  great  Franco-Austrian  actress.  She  had 
ample  opportunities  for  observation,  because  during  the  first 
week  of  her  tour  the  precise  people  who  count  the  most  in 
our  informal  social  hierarchy  took  her  up  and,  upon  examina 
tion,  took  her  in.  Playing  in  English  as  she  did,  and  with 
an  American  supporting  company,  she  did  not  make  a  great 
financial  success  (the  Continental  technique,  especially  when 
contrasted  so  intimately  with  the  one  we  are  familiar  with 
does  not  attract  us),  but  socially  she  was  a  sensation.  So  dur 
ing  her  four  weeks  in  Chicago,  while  she  played  to  houses  that 
couldn't  be  dressed  to  look  more  than  a  third  full,  she  was 
enormously  in  demand  for  luncheons,  teas,  dinners,  suppers, 
Christmas  bazaars,  charity  dances  and  so  on.  (If  it  had  only 
been  possible  to  establish  a  scale  of  fees  for  these  functions, 
her  manager  used  to  reflect  despairingly,  he  might  have  come 


83  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

out  even  after  all.)  Any  other  sort  of  engagement  melted 
away  like  snow  in  the  face  of  an  opportunity  of  meeting  Si- 
mone  Greville. 

Rose  had  met  her  a  number  of  times  before  the  incident 
referred  to  happened,  but  had  always  surveyed  the  lioness 
from  afar.  What  could  she,  whose  acquaintance  with  Europe 
was  limited  to  one  three-months  trip,  undertaken  by  the 
family  during  the  summer  after  she  graduated  from  high 
school,  have  to  say  to  an  omniscient  cosmopolite  like  that  ? 

So  she  hung  about,  within  ear-shot  when  it  Mras  possible, 
and  watched,  leaving  the  active  duties  of  entertainment  to 
heavily  cultured  illuminati  like  the  Howard  Wests,  or  to 
clever  creatures  like  Hermione  Woodruif  and  Frederica,  and 
Constance  Crawford,  whose  French  was  good  enough  to  fill  in 
the  interstices  in  Madame  Greville's  English. 

She  was  standing  about  like  that  at  a  tea  one  afternoon, 
when  she  heard  the  actress  make  the  remark  already  quoted, 
to  the  effect  that  American  women  seemed  to  her  to  be  an  ex 
ception  to  what  she  always  supposed  to  be  the  general  law  of 
sex  attraction. 

It  was  taken,  by  the  rather  tense  little  circle  gathered 
around  her,  as  a  compliment;  exactly  as,  no  doubt,  Greville 
intended  it  to  be  taken.  But  her  look  flashed  out  beyond  the 
confines  of  the  circle  and  encountered  a  pair  of  big  luminous 
eyes,  under  brows  that  had  a  perplexed  pucker  in  them. 
AYhereupon  she  laughed  straight  into  Rose's  face  and  said, 
lifting  her  head  a  little,  but  not  her  voice : 

"Come  here,  my  child,  and  tell  me  who  you  are  and  why 
you  were  looking  at  me  like  that." 

Rose  flushed,  smiled  that  irresistible  wide  smile  of  hers, 
and  came,  not  frightened  a  bit,  nor,  exactly,  embarrassed; 
certainly  not  into  pretending  she  was  not  surprised,  and  a 
little  breathlessly  at  a  loss  what  to  say. 

"I'm  Rose  Aldrich:"  She  didn't,  in  words,  say,  "I'm  just 
Rose  Aldrich."  It  was  the  little  bend  in  her  voice  that  car 
ried  that  impression.  "And  I  suppose  I  was — looking  that 
way,  because  I  was  wishing  I  knew  exactly  what  you  meant 
by  what  you  said." 


THE   FIRST    QUESTION  83 

GrSville's  eyes,  somehow,  concentrated  and  intensified  their 
gaze  upon  the  flushed  young  face;  took  a  sort  of  plunge,  so 
it  seemed  to  Rose,  to  the  very  depths  of  her  own.  It  was  an 
electrifying  thing  to  have  happen  to  you. 

"Mon  dieu"  she  said,  "j'ai  grande  envie  de  vous  le  dire." 
She  hesitated  the  fraction  of  a  moment,  glanced  at  a  tiny 
watch  set  in  a  ring  upon  the  middle  finger  of  her  right  hand, 
took  Rose  by  the  arm  as  if  to  keep  her  from  getting  away, 
and  turned  to  her  hostess. 

"You  must  forgive  me,"  she  said,  "if  I  make  my  farewells 
a  little  soon.  I  am  under  orders  to  have  some  air  each  day 
before  I  go  to  the  theater,  and  if  it  is  to  be  done  to-day,  it 
must  be  now.  I  am  sorry.  I  have  had  a  very  pleasant  after 
noon. — Make  your  farewells,  also,  my  child,"  she  concluded, 
turning  to  her  prisoner,  "because  you  are  going  with  me." 

There  was  something  Olympian  about  tbe  way  she  did  it. 
The  excuse  was  made,  and  the  regret  expressed  in  the  interest 
of  courtesy,  but  neither  was  insisted  on  as  a  fact,  nor  was 
seriously  intended,  it  appeared,  even  to  disguise  the  fact, 
which  was  simply  that  she  had  found  something  better  worth 
her  while,  for  the  moment,  than  that  tea.  It  occurred  to  Rose 
that  there  wasn't  a  woman  in  town — not  even  terrible  old 
Mrs.  Crawford,  Constance's  mother-in-law,  who  could  have 
done  that  thing  in  just  that  way ;  no  one  who  felt  herself  de 
tached,  or,  in  a  sense,  superior  enough,  to  have  done  it  with 
out  a  trace  of  self-consciousness,  and  consequently  without 
offense.  An  empress  must  do  things  a  good  deal  like  that. 

The  effect  on  Rose  was  to  make  complete  frankness  seem 
the  easiest  thing  in  the  world.  And  frankness  seemed  to  be 
the  thing  called  for.  Because  no  sooner  were  they  seated  in 
the  actress'  car  and  headed  north  along  the  drive,  than  she, 
instead  of  answering  Rose's  question,  repeated  one  of  her  own. 

"I  ask  who  you  are,  and  you  say  your  name — Rose  some 
thing.  But  that  tells  me  nothing.  Who  are  you — one  of 
them?" 

"No,  not  exactly,"  said  Rose.  "Only  by  accident.  The  man 
I  married  is — one  of  them,  in  a  way.  I  mean,  because  of  his 
family  and  all  that.  And  so  they  take  me  in." 


84  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUBE 

"So  you  are  married/'  said  the  French  woman.  "But  not 
since  long?" 

"Six  months/'  said  Eose. 

She  said  it  so  with  the  air  of  regarding  it  as  a  very  consid 
erable  period  of  time  that  Greville  laughed. 

"But  tell  me  about  him  then,  this  husband  of  yours.  I  saw 
him  perhaps  at  the  tea  this  afternoon?" 

Eose  laughed.  "Xo,  he  draws  the  line  at  teas/'  she  said. 
"He  says  that  from  seven  o'clock  on,  until  as  late  as  I  like, 
he's — game,  you  know — willing  to  do  whatever  I  like.  But 
until  seven,  there  are  no — well,  he  says,  siren  songs  for  him." 

"Tell  me — you  will  forgive  the  indiscretions  of  a  stranger  ? 
— how  has  it  arrived  that  you  married  him?  Was  it  one  of 
your  American  romances?" 

"It  didn't  seem  very  romantic,"  said  Eose.  "I  mean  not 
much  like  the  romantic  stories  you  read,  and  of  course  one 
couldn't  make  a  story  about  it,  because  there  was  nothing  to 
tell.  We  just  happened  to  get  acquainted,  and  we  knew  al 
most  straight  off  that  we  wanted  to  marry  each  other,  so  we 
did.  Some  people  thought  it  was  a  little — headlong,  I  sup 
pose,  but  he  said  it  was  an  adventure  anyway,  and  that  peo 
ple  could  never  tell  how  it  was  going  to  come  out  until  they 
tried.  So  we  tried,  and — it  came  out  very  well." 

"It  'came  out'?"  questioned  the  actress. 

"Yes,"  said  Eose.     "Ended  happily,  you  know." 

"Ended !"  Madame  Greville  echoed.     Then  she  laughed. 

Eose  flushed  and  smiled  at  herself.  "Of  course  I  don't 
mean  that,"  she  admitted,  "and  I  suppose  six  months  isn't  so 
very  long.  Still  you  could  find  out  quite  a  good  deal  .  .  ." 

"What  is  his  affair  ?"  The  actress  preferred  asking  another 
question,  it  seemed,  to  committing  herself  to  an  answer  to 
Eose's  unspoken  one.  "Is  he  one  of  your — what  you  call 
tired  business  men?" 

"He's  never  tired,"  said  Eose,  "and  he  isn't  a  business  man. 
He's  a  lawyer — a  rather  special  kind  of  lawyer.  He  has  other 
lawyers,  mostly,  for  his  clients.  He's  awfully  enthusiastic 
about  it.  He  says  it's  the  finest  profession  in  the  world,  if 
you  don't  let  yourself  get  dragged  down  into  the  stupid  rou- 


THE    FIRST    QUESTION  85 

tine  of  it.  It  certainly  sounds  thrilling  when  he  tells  about 
it." 

The  actress  looked  round  at  her.  "So/'  she  said,  "you  fol 
low  his  work  as  he  follows  your  play?  He  talks  seriously  to 
you  about  his  affairs?" 

"Why,  yes,"  said  Rose,  "we  have  wonderful  talks."  Then 
she  hesitated.  "At  least  we  used  to  have.  There  hasn't 
seemed  to  be  much — time,  lately.  I  suppose  that's  it." 

"One  question  more,"  said  the  French  woman,  "and  not  an 
idle  one — you  will  believe  that?  Alors!  You  love  your  hus 
band.  No  need  to  ask  that.  But  how  do  you  love  him?  Are 
you  a  little  indulgent,  a  little  cool,  a  little  contemptuous  of 
the  grossness  of  masculine  clay,  and  still  willing  to  tolerate  it 
as  part  of  your  bargain?  Is  that  what  you  mean  by  love? 
Or  do  you  mean  something  different  altogether — something 
vital  and  strong  and  essential — the  meeting  of  thought  with 
thought,  need  with  need,  desire  with  desire?" 

"Yes,"  said  Rose  after  a  little  silence,  "that's  what  I  mean." 

She  said  it  quietly,  but  without  embarrassment  and  with 
full  meaning;  and  as  if  conscious  of  the  adequacy  of  her  an 
swer,  she  forbore  to  embroider  on  the  theme.  There  was  a 
momentary  silence,  while  the  French  woman  gazed  contem 
platively  out  of  the  open  window  of  the  limousine,  at  a  sky- 
scraping  apartment  building  which  jutted  boldly  into  a  curve 
of  the  parkway  they  were  flying  along. 

"That's  a  beauty,  isn't  it?"  said  Rose,  following  her  gaze. 
"Every  apartment  in  that  building  has  its  own  garage  that 
you  get  to  with  an  elevator." 

The  actress  nodded.  "You  Americans  do  that,"  she  said, 
"better  than  any  one  else  in  the  Avorld.  The — surfaces  of  your 
lives  are  to  marvel  at." 

"But  with  nothing  inside  ?"  asked  Rose.  "Is  that  what  you 
mean?  Is — that  what  you  mean  about — American  women, 
that  you  said  you'd  tell  me  ?" 

Madame  Greville  took  her  time  about  answering.  "They 
are  an  enigma  to  me,"  she  said,  "I  confess  it.  I  have  never 
seen  such  women  anywhere,  as  these  upper-class  Americans. 
They  are  beautiful,  clever,  they  know  how  to  dress.  For  the 


86  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUKE 

first  hour,  or  day,  or  week,  of  an  acquaintance,  they  have  a 
charm  quite  incomparable.  And,  up  to  a  certain  point,  they 
exercise  it.  Your  jeunes  fittes  are  amazing.  All  over  the 
world,  men  go  mad  about  them.  But  when  they  marry 
.  .  ."  She  finished  the  sentence  with  the  ghost  of  a  shrug, 
and  turned  to  Eose.  "Can  you  account  for  them  ?  Were  you 
wondering  at  them,  too,  with  those  great  eyes  of  yours? 
Alors!  Are  we  puzzled  by  the  same  thing?  What  is  it,  to 
you,  they  lack?" 

Eose  stirred  a  little  uneasily.  "I  don't  know  very  much," 
she  said.  "I  don't  know  them  well  at  all,  and  of  course  I 
shouldn't  criticize  .  .  ." 

"Ah,  child,"  broke  in  the  actress,  "there  you  mistake  your 
self.  One  must  always  criticize.  It  is  by  the  power  of  criti 
cism  and  the  courage  of  criticism,  that  we  have  become  dif 
ferent  from  the  beasts." 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Eose,  "except  that  some  of  them  seem 
a  little  dissatisfied  and  restless,  as  if — well,  as  if  they  wanted 
something  they  haven't  got." 

"But  do  they  truly  want  it?"  Madame  Greville  demanded. 
"I  am  willing  to  be  convinced,  but  myself,  I  find  of  your 
women  of  the  aristocrat  class,  the  type  most  characteristic  is" 
— she  paused  and  said  the  thing  first  to  herself  in  French, 
then  translated — "is  a  passive  epicure  in  sensations;  sensa 
tions  mostly  mental,  irritating  or  soothing — a  pleasant  va 
riety.  She  waits  to  be  made  to  feel;  she  perpetually — tastes. 
One  may  demand  whether  it  is  that  their  precocity  has  ex 
hausted  them  before  they  are  ripe,  or  whether  your  Puritan 
strain  survives  to  make  all  passion  reprehensible,  or  whether 
simply  they  have  too  many  ideas. to  leave  room  for  anything 
else.  But,  from  whatever  cause,  they  give  to  a  stranger  like 
me,  the  impression  of  being  perfectly  frigid,  perfectly  pas 
sionless.  And  so,  as  you  say,  of  missing  the  great  thing  al 
together. 

"A  few  of  your  women  are  great,  but  not  as  women,  and  of 
second-rate  men  in  petticoats,  you  have  a  vast  number.  But 
a  woman,  great  by  the  qualities  of  her  sex,  an  artist  in  wom 
anhood,  I  have  not  seen." 


THE    FIRST    QUESTION  87 

"Oh,  I  wish,"  cried  Eose,  "tliat  I  knew  what  you  meant  by 
that !" 

"Why,  regard  now,"  said  the  actress.  "In  every  capital  of 
Europe — and  I  know  them  all — wherever  you  find  great  af 
fairs — matters  of  state,  diplomacy,  politics — you  find  the  in 
fluence  of  women  in  them;  women  of  the  great  world,  some 
times,  sometimes  of  the  half-world;  great  women,  at  all 
events,  with  the  power  to  make  or  ruin  great  careers ;  women 
at  whose  feet  men  of  the  first  class  lay  all  they  have ;  women 
the  tact  of  whose  hands  is  trusted  to  determine  great  matters. 
They  may  not  be  beautiful  (I  have  seen  a  faded  little  woman 
of  fifty,  of  no  family  or  wealth,  whose  salon  attracted  minis 
ters  of  state),  they  haven't  the  education,  nor  the  liberties 
that  your  women  enjoy,  and,  in  the  mass,  they  are  not  re 
garded — how  do  you  say  ?• — cliivalrously.  Yet  there  they  are ! 

"And  why?  Because  they  are  capable  of  great  passions, 
great  desires.  They  are  willing  to  take  the  art  of  womanhood 
seriously,  make  sacrifices  for  it,  as  one  must  for  any  art,  in 
order  to  triumph  in  it." 

Rose  thought  this  over  rather  dubiously.  It  was  a  new  no 
tion  to  her — or  almost  new.  Portia  had  told  her  once  she 
never  would  have  any  trouble  making  her  husband  "want" 
her  as  much  as  she  liked.  This  idea  of  making  a  serious  art 
of  your  power  to  attract  and  influence  men,  seemed  to  range 
itself  in  the  same  category. 

"But  suppose,"  she  objected,  "one  doesn't  want  to  triumph 
at  it?  Suppose  one  wants  to  be  a — person,  rather  than  just 
a  woman  ?" 

"There  are  other  careers  indeed,"  Madame  Greville  ad 
mitted,  "and  one  can  follow  them  in  the  same  spirit,  make 
the  sacrifices — pay  the  price  they  demand.  Mon  dieu!  How 
I  have  preached.  Now  you  shall  talk  to  me.  It  was  for  that 
I  took  you  captive  and  ran  away  with  you." 

For  the  next  half-hour,  until  the  car  stopped  in  front  of 
her  house,  Rose  acted  on  this  request ;  told  about  her  life  be 
fore  and  since  her  marriage  to  Rodney,  about  her  friends, 
her  amusements — anything  that  came  into  her  mind.  But 
she  lingered  before  getting  out  of  the  car,  to  say: 


88  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"I  hope  I  haven't  forgotten  a  single  word  of  your — preach 
ing.  You  said  so  many  things  I  want  to  think  about." 

"Don't  trouble  your  soul  with  that,  child,"  said  the  actress. 
"All  the  sermon  you  need  can  be  boiled  down  into  a  sentence, 
and  until  you  have  found  it  out  for  yourself,  you  won't  be 
lieve  it." 

"Try  me,"  said  Rose. 

"Then  attend. — How  shall  I  say  it  ? — Nothing  worth  having 
comes  as  a  gift,  nor  even  can  be  bought — cheap.  Everything 
of  value  in  your  life  will  cost  you  dear;  and  some  time  or  other 
you'll  have  to  pay  the  price  of  it." 

It  was  with  a  very  thoughtful,  perplexed  face  that  Rose 
watched  the  car  drive  away,  and  then  walked  slowly  into  her 
house — the  ideal  house  that  had  cost  Florence  McCrea  and 
Bertie  Willis  so  many  hours  and  so  many  hair-line  decisions 
— and  allowed  herself  to  be  relieved  of  her  wraps  by  the  per 
fect  maid,  who  had  all  but  been  put  in  the  lease. 

The  actress  had  said  many  strange  and  puzzling  things 
during  their  ride ;  things  to  be  accepted  only  cautiously,  after 
a  careful  thinking  out.  But  strangest  of  all  was  this  last  ob 
servation  of  hers;  that  there  was  nothing  of  worth  in  your 
life  that  you  hadn't  to  pay  a  heavy  price  for. 

Certainly  it  contradicted  violently  everything  in  Rose's  ex 
perience,  for  everything  she  valued  had  come  to  her  precisely 
as  a  gift.  Her  mother's  and  Portia's  love  of  her,  the  life  that 
had  surrounded  her  in  school  and  at  the  university,  the 
friends;  and  then,  with  her  marriage,  the  sudden  change  in 
her  estate,  the  thrills,  the  excitement,  the  comparative  lux 
uries  of  the  new  life.  Why, — even  Rodney  himself,  about 
whom  everything  else  swung  in  an  orbit !  What  price  had  she 
paid  for  him,  or  for  any  of  the  rest  of  it?  It  was  all  as  free 
as  the  air  she  breathed.  It  had  come  to  her  without  having 
cost  even  a  wish.  Was  Rodney's  love  for  her,  therefore, 
valueless  ?  No,  the  French  woman  was  certainly  wrong  about 
that. 


CHAPTER  III 

"WHERE    DID   EOSE    COJIE   IN 

HOWEVEH,  it  was  one  thing  to  decide  that  this  was  so,  and 
quite  another  thing  to  dismiss  the  preposterous  idea  from  her 
mind.  There  was  still  an  hour  hefore  she  need  begin  dressing 
for  the  Randolph  dinner,  but  as  she  had  already  had  her  tea 
and  there  was  nothing  else  to  do,  she  thought  she  might  as 
well  go  about  it.  It  might  help  her  resist  a  certain  perfectly 
irrational  depression  which  the  talk  with  the  actress,  some 
what  surprisingly,  had  produced.  And  besides,  if  she  were 
all  dressed  when  Rodney  came  home,  she'd  be  free  to  visit 
with  him  while  he  dressed — to  sit  and  watch  him  swearing  at 
his  studs,  and  tell  him  about  the  events  of  her  day,  including 
their  climax  in  the  ride  with  the  famous  Simone  Greville. 
And  he'd  come  over  every  now  and  then  and  interrupt  him 
self  and  her  with  some  sort  of  unexpected  caress — a  kiss  on 
the  back  of  her  neck,  or  an  embrace  that  would  threaten  her 
coiffure — and  this  vague,  scary,  nightmarish  sort  of  feeling, 
which  for  no  reasonable  reason  at  all  seemed  to  be  clutching 
at  her,  would  be  forgotten. 

It  was  a  queer  sort  of  feeling — a  kind  of  misgiving,  in  one 
form  or  another,  as  to  her  own  identity — as  if  all  the  events 
since  her  marriage  were  nothing  but  a  dream  of  Rose  Stan- 
ton's,  from  which,  with  vague  painful  stirrings,  she  was  just 
beginning  to  wake.  Or,  again,  as  if  for  all  these  months,  she 
had  been  playing  a  part  in  a  preposterously  long  play,  on 
which  the  curtain  was,  presently,  going  to  be  rung  down.  She 
wished  Rodney  would  come — hoped  he  wouldn't  be  late,  and 
finally  sat  down  before  the  telephone  with  a  half-formed  idea 
of  calling  him  up  and  reminding  him  that  they  were  dining 
with  the  Randolphs. 

Just  as  she  laid  her  hand  upon  the  receiver,  the  telephone 
bell  rang.     It  was  Rodney  calling  her. 

89 


90 

"Oh,  that  you,  Rose?"  he  said.  "I  shan't  be  out  till  late 
to-night.  I've  got  to  work." 

She  wanted  to  know  what  he  meant  by  late. 

"I've  no  idea,"  he  said.  "Ten — twelve — two.  I've  got  to 
get  hold  of  something,  but  I've  no  idea  how  long  it  will  take." 

"But,  Roddy,  dearest,"  she  protested.  "You  have  to  come 
home.  You've  got  the  Randolphs'  dinner." 

"Oh,  the  devil !"  he  said.  "I  forgot  all  about  it.  But  it 
doesn't  make  a  bit  of  difference,  anyway.  I  wouldn't  leave 
the  office  before  I  finished  this  job,  for  anybody  short  of  the 
Angel  Gabriel." 

"But  what  shall  we  do?"  she  asked  despairingly. 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Rodney.  "Call  them  up  and  tell  them. 
Randolph  will  understand." 

"But," — it  was  absurd  that  her  eyes  should  be  filling  up 
and  her  throat  getting  lumpy  over  a  thing  like  this, — "but 
what  shall  I  do  ?  Shall  I  tell  Eleanor  we  can't  come,  or  shall 
I  offer  to  come  without  you?" 

"Lord!"  he  said,  "I  don't  care.  Do  whichever  you  like. 
I've  got  enough  to  think  about  without  deciding  that.  Now 
do  hang  up  and  run  along." 

"But,  Rodney,  what's  happened?  Has  something  gone 
wrong  ?" 

"Heavens,  no !"  he  said.  "What  is  there  to  go  wrong  ?  I've 
got  a  big  day  in  court  to-morrow  and  I've  struck  a  snag, 
and  I've  got  to  wriggle  out  of  it  somehow,  before  I  quit. 
It's  nothing  for  you  to  worry  about.  Go  to  your  dinner  and 
have  a  good  time.  Good-by." 

The  click  in  the  receiver  told  her  he  had  hung  up. 

The  difficulty  about  the  Randolphs  was  managed  easily 
enough.  Eleanor  was  perfectly  gracious  about  it  and  insisted 
that  Rose  should  come  by  herself. 

She  was  completely  dressed  a  good  three-quarters  of  an 
hour  before  it  was  time  to  start,  and  after  pretending  for 
fifteen  interminable  minutes  to  read  a  magazine,  she  chucked 
it  away  and  told  her  maid  to  order  the  car  at  once.  If  she 
drove  straight  down-town,  she  could  have  a  ten-minute  visit 
with  Rodney  and  still  not  be  late  for  the  dinner.  She  was  a 


WHEKE   DID   ROSE   COME   IN  91 

little  vague  as  to  why  she  wanted  it  so  much,  but  the  prospect 
was  irresistible. 

If  any  one  had  accused  her  of  feeling  very  meritorious 
over  not  having  allowed  herself  to  be  hurt  at  his  rudeness  to 
her  or  annoyed  at  the  way  he  had  demolished  their  evening's 
plans,  and  of  hoping  to  make  him  feel  a  little  contrite  by 
showing  him  how  sweet  she  was  about  it,  she  might,  with  a 
rueful  grin,  have  acknowledged  a  tincture  of  truth  about  the 
charge ;  but  she  didn't  discover  it  by  herself.  As  she  dreamed 
out  the  little  scene,  riding  down-town  in  the  car,  she'd  come 
stealing  up  behind  him  as  he  sat,  bent  wearily  over  his  book, 
and  clasp  her  hands  over  his  eyes  and  stroke  the  wrinkles  out 
of  his  forehead.  He'd  give  a  long  sigh  of  relaxation,  and  pull 
her  down  on  the  chair-arm  and  tell  her  what  it  was  that  trou 
bled  him,  and  she'd  tell  him  not  to  worry — it  was  surely  com 
ing  out  all  right.  And  she'd  stroke  his  head  a  little  longer 
and  offer  not  to  go  to  the  dinner  if  he  Avanted  her  to  stay,  and 
he'd  say,  no,  he  was  better  already,  and  then  she'd  give  him  a 
good-by  kiss  and  steal  away,  and  be  the  life  of  the  party  at 
the  Eandolphs'  dinner,  but  her  thoughts  would  never  leave 
him  .  .  . 

She  knew  she  was  being  silly  of  course,  and  her  beautiful 
wide  mouth  smiled  an  acknowledgment  of  the  fact,  even  while 
her  cheeks  flushed  and  her  eyes  brightened  over  the  picture. 
Of  course  it  wouldn't  come  out  exactly  like  that. 

Well,  it  didn't ! 

She  found  a  single  elevator  in  commission  in  the  great 
gloomy  rotunda  of  the  office  building,  and  the  watchman  who 
ran  her  up  made  a  terrible  noise  shutting  the  gate  after  he 
had  let  her  out  on  the  fifteenth  floor.  The  dim  marble  cor 
ridor  echoed  her  footfalls  ominously,  and  when  she  reached 
the  door  to  his  outer  office  and  tried  it,  she  found  it  locked. 
The  next  door  down  the  corridor  was  the  one  that  led  directl}' 
into  his  private  office,  and  here  the  light  shone  through  the 
ground-glass. 

She  stole  up  to  it  as  softly  as  she  could,  tried  it  and  found 
it  locked,  too,  so  she  knocked.  Through  the  open  transom 
above  it,  she  heard  him  say  "Hell !"  in  a  heartfelt  sort  of  way, 


92  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

and  heard  his  chair  thrust  back.  The  next  moment  he  opened 
the  door  with  a  jerk. 

His  glare  of  annoyance  changed  to  bewilderment  at  the 
sight  of  her,  and  he  said: 

"Eose  !  Has  anything  happened  ?  What's  the  matter  ?" 
And  catching  her  by  the  arm,  he  led  her  into  the  office.  "Here, 
sit  down  and  get  your  breath  and  tell  me  about  it !" 

She  smiled  and  took  his  face  in  both  her  hands.  "But  it's 
the  other  wa}r,"  she  said.  "There's  nothing  the  matter  with 
me.  I  came  down,  you  poor  old  boy,  to  see  what  was  the 
matter  with  you." 

He  frowned  and  took  her  hands  away  and  stepped  back  out 
of  her  reach.  Had  it  not  been  for  the  sheer  incredibility  of  it, 
she'd  have  thought  that  her  touch  was  actually  distasteful  to 
him. 

"Oh,"  he  said.  "I  thought  I  told  you  over  the  phone  there 
was  nothing  the  matter ! — Won't  you  be  awfully  late  to  the 
Randolphs'  ?" 

"I  had  ten  minutes,"  she  said,  "and  I  thought     .     .     ." 

She  broke  off  the  sentence  when  she  saw  him  snap  out  his 
watch  and  look  at  it. 

"I  know  there's  something,"  she  said.  "I  can  tell  just  by 
the  way  your  eyes  look  and  the  way  you're  so  tight  and — 
strained.  If  you'd  just  tell  me  about  it,  and  then  sit  down 
and  let  me — try  to  take  the  strain  away  .  .  ." 

Beyond  a  doubt  the  strain  was  there.  The  laugh  he  meant 
for  a  good-humored  dismissal  of  her  fears,  didn't  sound  at  all 
as  it  was  intended  to. 

"Can't  you  tell  me?"  she  repeated. 

"Good  heavens!"  he  said.  "There's  nothing  to  tell!  I've 
got  an  argument  before  the  Court  of  Appeals  to-morrow  and 
there's  a  ruling  decision  against  me.  It  is  against  me,  and 
it's  bad  law.  But  that  isn't  what  I  want  to  tell  them.  I 
want  some  way  of  making  a  distinction  BO  that  I  can  hold 
that  the  decision  doesn't  rule." 

"And  it  wouldn't  help,"  she  ventured,  "if  you  told  me  all 
about  it?  I  don't  care  about  the  dinner." 

"I  couldn't  explain  in  a  month,"  he  said. 


WHERE    DID    ROSE   COME    IN  93 

"Oh,  I  irish  I  were  some  good,"  she  said  forlornly. 

He  pulled  out  his  watch  again  and  began  pacing  up  and 
down  the  room. 

"I  just  can't  stand  it  to  see  you  like  that,"  she  broke  out 
again.  "If  you'll  only  sit  down  for  five  minutes  and  let  mo 
try  to  get  that  strained  look  out  of  your  eyes  .  .  ." 

"Good  God,  Rose !"  he  shouted.  "Can't  you  take  my  word 
for  it  and  let  it  alone?  I'm  not  ill,  nor  frightened,  nor 
broken-hearted.  I  don't  need  to  be  comforted  nor  encouraged. 
I'm  in  an  intellectual  quandary.  For  the  next  three  hours, 
or  six,  or  however  long  it  takes,  I  want  my  mind  to  run  cold 
and  smooth.  I've  got  to  be  tight-  and  strained.  That's  the 
way  the  job's  done.  You  can't  solve  an  intellectual  problem 
by  having  your  hand  held,  or  your  eyes  kissed,  or  anything 
like  that.  Now,  for  God's  sake,  child,  run  along  and  let  me 
forget  you  ever  existed,  for  a  while  I" 

And  he  ground  his  teeth  over  an  impulse  that  all  but  got 
the  better  of  him,  after  she'd  shut  the  door,  to  follow  her  out 
into  the  corridor  and  pull  her  up  in  his  arms  and  kiss  her 
face  all  over,  and  to  consign  the  Law  and  the  Prophets  both, 
to  the  devil. 


CHAPTER  IV 

LONG    CIECTJITS  AND    SHORT 

JAMES  RANDOLPH  was  a  native  Chicagoan,  but  his  father, 
an  intelligent  and  prosperous  physician,  with  a  general  prac 
tise  in  one  of  the  northern  suburbs,  afterward  annexed  to  the 
city,  did  not  belong  to  the  old  before-the-fire  aristocracy  that 
Rodney  and  Frederica,  and  Martin  "Whitney,  the  Crawfords 
and  Violet  Williamson  were  born  into.  The  medical  tradition 
carried  itself  along  to  the  third  generation,  when  James  made 
a  profession  of  it,  and  in  him,  it  flowered  really  into  genius. 
From  the  beginning  his  bent  toward  the  psychological  aspect 
of  it  was  marked  and  his  father  was  sympathetic  enough  to 
give  it  free  sway.  After  graduating  from  one  of  the  Chicago 
medical  colleges  he  went  to  Johns  Hopkins,  and  after  that  to 
A^ienna,  where  he  worked  mostly  under  Professor  Freud. 

It  was  in  Vienna  that  he  met  Eleanor  Blair.  She,  too,  was 
a  native  of  Illinois,  but  this  fact  cut  a  very  different  figure 
in  her  life  from  that  which  it  cut  in  his.  Her  grandfather, 
a  pioneer,  forceful,  thrifty  and  probably  rather  unscrupulous, 
had  settled  on  the  wonderfully  fertile  land  at  a  time  when 
one  had  almost  to  drive  the  Indians  off  it.  He  had  accumu 
lated  it  steadily  to  the  day  of  his  death  and  died  in  possession 
of  about  thirty  thousand  acres  of  it.  It  was  in  much  this 
fashion  that  a  feudal  adventurer  became  the  founder  of  a 
line  of  landed  nobility,  but  the  centrifugal  force  of  American 
life  caused  the  thing  to  work  out  differently.  His  son  had  an 
eastern  college  education,  got  elected  to  Congress,  as  a  prelimi 
nary  step  in  a  political  career,  went  to  Washington,  fell  in 
love  with  and  married  the  beautiful  daughter  of  an  unrecon 
structed  and  impoverished  southern  gentleman.  She  detested 
the  North,  and  as  her  love  for  the  South  found  its  expression 
in  passionate  laments  over  its  ruin,  uncomplicated  by  any 

94 


LONG    CIRCUITS    AND    SHORT  95 

desire  to  live  there,  slie  spent  more  and  more  of  her  time — 
her  husband's  faint  wishes  becoming  less  and  less  operative 
with  her  until  they  ceased  altogether — in  one  after  another 
of  the  European  capitals. 

So  Eleanor,  two  generations  away  from  the  fertile  soil  of 
central  Illinois,  was  as  exotic  to  it  as  an  orchid  would  be  in 
a  Xew  England  garden.  Two  or  three  brief  perfunctory  vis 
its  to  the  land  her  income  came  from,  and  to  the  relatives 
who  still  lived  upon  it,  became  the  substitute  for  what,  in  an 
older  and  stabler  civilization,  would  have  been  the  dominant 
tradition  in  her  life. 

She  must  have  been  a  source  of  profound  satisfaction  to 
large  numbers  of  French,  Italian,  Austrian  and  English  per 
sons,  to  whose  eminent  social  circles  her  mother's  wealth  and 
breeding  gained  admittance,  by  embodying  for  them,  with 
perfect  authenticity,  their  notion  of  the  American  girl.  She 
was  rich,  beautiful,  clever  in  a  rather  shallow,  "American" 
way,  she  had  a  will  of  her  own,  and  was  indulged  by  her 
mother  with  an  astounding  amount  of  liberty;  she  was  au 
dacious,  yet  with  a  tempering  admixture  of  cool  shrewdness, 
which  kept  her  out  of  the  difficulties  she  was  always  on  the 
brink  of. 

Kept  her  out  of  them,  that  is,  until,  in  Vienna,  as  I  have 
said,  she  met  James  Randolph.  That  she  fell  in  love  with 
him  is  one  of  those  facts  which  seem  astonishing  the  first  time 
you  look  at  them,  and  inevitable  when  you  look  again.  Phys 
ically,  a  sanguine  blond,  with  a  narrow  head,  a  forward 
thrusting  nose,  and  really  blue  eyes,  his  dominating  spiritual 
quality  was  the  sort  of  asceticism  which  proclaims  not  weak 
anemic  desires,  but  strong  unruly  ones,  curbed  in  by  the  hand 
of  a  still  stronger  will.  He  was  highly  imaginative,  as  a  suc 
cessful  follower  of  the  Freudian  method,  must  be.  He  was 
capable  of  the  gentlest  sympathy,  and  of  the  most  relentless 
insistence.  And  he  thought,  until  he  met  Eleanor  Blair,  that 
he  was,  indisputably,  his  own  master. 

The  wide  social  gulf  between  them — between  a  beautiful 
American  heiress  with  the  entry  into  all  circles  of  aristocratic 
society,  except  the  highest,  and  an  only  decently  pecunious 


96  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

medical  student,  caught  both  of  them  off  their  guard.  The 
utter  unlikelihood  of  anything  coming  of  such  an  acquain 
tance  as  theirs,  was  just  the  ambush  needed  to  make  it  possi 
ble  for  them  to  fall  in  love.  They  would,  probably,  have  at 
tracted  each  other  anywhere.  But,  in  a  city  like  Vienna, 
where  all  the  sensuous  appurtenances  of  life  are  raised  to 
their  highest  power,  the  attraction  became  irresistible. 

He  did  resist  as  long  as  he  could — successfully,  indeed,  to 
the  point  of  holding  himself  back  from  asking  her  to  marry 
him,  or  even  explicitly  from  making  love  to  her.  But  the 
thing  shone  through  his  deeply-colored  emotions,  like  light 
through  a  stained-glass  window.  And  when  she  asked  him 
to  marry  her,  as  she  did  in  so  many  words — pleaded  her  home 
sickness  for  a  home  she  had  never  known,  and  a  loneliness 
she  had  suddenly  become  aware  of,  amid  would-be  friends  and 
lovers,  who  could  not,  not  one  of  them,  be  called  disinterested, 
his  resistance  melted  like  a  powder  of  April  snow. 

It  was  the  only  serious  obstacle  she  had  to  overcome.  The 
terms  of  her  father's  will  left  her  share  of  the  income  of  the 
estate  wholly  at  her  disposal.  And  so,  in  spite  of  her  mother's 
horrified  protest,  they  were  married,  and  not  long  afterward, 
her  mother,  who  was  still  a  year  or  two  on  the  sunny  side  of 
fifty,  gratified  her  aristocratic  yearnings  by  marrying  a  count 
herself. 

The  Randolphs  came  back  to  America  and,  somewhat 
against  Eleanor's  wishes,  settled  in  Chicago.  With  her  really 
very  large  income,  her  exotic  type  of  beauty  and  her  social 
skill,  she  was  probably  right  in  thinking  she  could  have  made 
a  success  anywhere.  One  of  the  larger  eastern  cities — prefer 
ably  New  York  or  Washington,  would  have  suited  her  better. 
But  Chicago,  he  said,  was  where  he  belonged  and  where  his 
best  chance  for  professional  success  lay,  and  she  yielded, 
though  without  waiving  her  privilege  of  making  a  more  or 
less  good-humored  grievance  of  it.  However,  she  found  the 
place  much  more  tolerable  than  riding  into  and  out  of  it  on 
the  train  a  few  times  had  led  her  to  expect. 

She  knew  a  few  people  of  exactly  the  right  sort  and  she 
neatly  and  almost  painlessly  detached  her  husband  from  his 


LONG    CIRCUITS    AND    SHORT  97 

old  Lake  View  associations.  She  looked  out  a  house  in  pre 
cisely  the  right  neighborhood,  and  furnished  it  to  combine 
the  splendor  of  her  income  with  the  simple  austerity  of  his 
profession  in  just  the  right  proportions.  She  trailed  her  game 
with  unfailing  precision,  never  barked  up  the  wrong  tree, 
could  distinguish  a  goat  from  a  sheep  as  far  as  she  could  see 
one,  and  in  no  time  at  all  had  won  the  exact  position  she 
wanted. 

Her  attitude  toward  her  husband  (you  have  already  had  a 
sample  of  it  at  Frederica's  famous  dinner,  where  Rodney  was 
supposed  to  take  the  preliminary  steps  toward  marrying  Her- 
mione  Woodruff)  attracted  general  admiration,  and  it  was 
fortified,  of  course,  by  the  story  of  their  romantic  marriage. 
It  was  conceded  she  had  done  a  very  fine  and  splendid  thing 
in  marrying  the  man  she  loved,  settling  down  to  live  with  him 
on  so  comparatively  simple  and  modest  a  scale,  and  devoting 
herself  so  whole-heartedly  to  his  career.  She  had  an  air — 
and  it  wasn't  consciously  assumed,  either — of  living  wholly 
with  reference  to  him,  which  people  found  exceedingly  en 
gaging.  (A  cynic  might  observe  at  this  point  that  the  same 
quality  in  a  homely  unattractive  woman  would  fail  of  pro 
ducing  this  effect.) 

Indeed,  he  had  much  to  be  grateful  for.  But  for  the  fact 
that  his  wife  was  accepted  without  reserve,  a  man  whose  prin 
cipal  preoccupation  was  with  matters  of  sex  psychology,  who 
was  said  to  cure  hysterical  and  neurasthenic  patients  by  the 
interpretation  of  their  dreams,  would  have  been  regarded 
askance  by  the  average  run  of  common-sense,  golf-playing 
men  of  affairs.  Even  his  most  miraculous  cures  would  be 
attributed  to  the  imaginary  nature  of  the  disease,  rather  than 
to  the  skill  of  the  physician. 

Not  even  his  wife's  undeniable  charm  could  altogether  ef 
face  this  impression  from  the  mind  of  this  sort  of  man.  But 
though  his  way  of  turning  the  theme  of  a  smoking-room  story 
into  a  subject  for  serious  scientific  discussion  might  make  you 
uncomfortable,  you  couldn't  meet  James  Randolph  and  hear 
him  talk,  without  respecting  him.  He  was  attractive  to  women 
(it  amounted  almost  to  fascination  with  the  neurotic  type), 


98  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

and  to  men  of  high  intelligence,  like  Rodney,  he  was  a  boon 
and  a  delight.  And  the  people  who  liked  him  least  were  pre 
cisely  those  most  attracted  by  his  wife.  Anyhow,  no  one  re 
fused  an  invitation  to  their  dinners. 

Rose's  arrival  at  this  one — a  little  late,  to  be  sure,  but  not 
scandalously — created  a  mild  sensation.  None  of  the  other 
guests  were  strangers,  either,  on  whom  she  could  have  the 
effect  of  novelty.  They  were  the  same  crowd,  pretty  much, 
who  had  been  encountering  one  another  all  winter — dancing, 
dining  and  talking  themselves  into  a  state  of  complete  satiety 
with  one  another.  They'd  split  up  pretty  soon  and  branch  out 
in  different  directions — the  Florida  east  coast,  California, 
Virginia  Hot  Springs  and  so  on,  and  so  galvanize  their  in 
terest  in  life  and  in  one  another.  At  present  they  were  ap 
proaching  the  lowest  ebb. 

But  when  Rose  came  into  the  drawing-room — in  a  wonder 
ful  gown  that  dared  much,  and  won  the  reward  of  daring — 
a  gown  she'd  meant  to  hold  in  reserve  for  a  greater  occasion, 
but  had  put  on  to-night  because  she  had  felt  somehow  like 
especially  pleasing  Rodney — when  she  came  in,  she  reoxy- 
genated  the  social  atmosphere.  She  won  a  moment  of  com 
plete  silence,  and  when  the  buzz  of  talk  arose  again,  it  was 
jerky — the  product  of  divided  minds  and  unstable  attentions. 

She  was,  in  fact,  a  stranger.  Her  voice  had  a  bead  on  it 
which  roused  a  perfectly  unreasoning  physical  excitement — 
the  kind  of  bead  which,  in  singing,  makes  all  the  difference 
between  a  church  choir  and  grand  opera.  The  glow  they  were 
accustomed  to  in  her  eyes,  concentrated  itself  into  flashes, 
and  the  flush  that  so  often,  and  so  adorably,  suffused  her  face, 
burnt  brighter  now  in  her  cheeks  and  left  the  rest  pale. 

And  these  were  true  indices  of  the  change  that  had  taken 
place  within  her.  From  sheer  numb  incredulity,  which  was 
all  she  had  felt  as  she'd  walked  away  from  Rodney's  office 
door,  and  from  the  pain  of  an  intolerable  hurt,  she  had  re 
acted  to  a  fine  glow  of  indignation.  She  had  found  herself 
suddenly  feeling  lighter,  older,  indescribably  more  confident. 
That  dinner  was  to  be  gone  through  with,  was  it?  Well,  it 
should  be !  They  shouldn't  suspect  her  humiliation  or  her 


LONG    CIRCUITS    AND    SHORT  99 

hurt.  She  was  conscious  suddenly  of  enormous  reserves  of 
power  hitherto  unsuspected  —  a  power  that  could  be  exercised 
to  any  extent  she  chose,  according  to  her  will. 

Her  husband,  James  Randolph  reflected,  had  evidently 
either  been  making  love  to  her,  or  indulging  in  the  civilized 
equivalent  of  beating  her;  he  was  curious  to  find  out  which. 
And  having  learned  from  his  wife  that  Rose  was  to  sit  beside 
him  at  the  table,  he  made  up  his  mind  that  he  would  make  her 
tell  him. 

He  didn't  attempt  it,  though,  during  his  first  talk  with  her 
—  confined  himself  rigorously  to  the  carefully  sifted  chaff 
which  does  duty  for  polite  conversation  over  the  same  hors- 
d'oeuvres  and  entrees,  from  one  dinner  to  the  next,  the  sea 
son  round.  It  wasn't  until  Eleanor  had  turned  the  table  the 
second  time,  that  he  made  his  first  gambit  in  the  game. 

"No  need  asking  you  if  you  like  this  sort  of  thing,"  he  said. 
"I  would  like  to  know  how  you  keep  it  up.  You  have  the 
same  things  said  to  you  seven  nights  a  week  and  you  make 
the  same  answers  —  thrust  and  parry,  carte  and  tierce,  buttons 
on  the  foils.  It  can't  any  of  it  get  anywhere.  What's  the 
attraction  ?" 

"You  can't  get  a  rise  out  of  me  to-night,"  said  Rose.  "Not 
after  what  I've  been  through  to-day.  Madame  Greville's  been 
talking  to  me.  She  thinks  American  women  are  dreadful 
dubs,  —  or  she  would  if  she  knew  the  word  —  thinks  we  don't 
know  our  own  game.  Do  you  agree  with  her?" 

"I'll  tell  you  that,"  he  said,  "after  you  answer  my  question. 
What's  the  attraction  ?" 

"Don't  you  think  it  would  be  a  mistake,"  said  Rose,  "for 
me  to  try  to  analyze  it?  Suppose  I  did  and  found  there 
wasn't  any  !  You  aren't  supposed  to  look  a  gift  horse  in  the 
mouth,  you  know." 

"Is  that  what's  the  matter  with  Rodney?"  he  asked.  "Is 
this  sort  of"  —  a  gesture  with  his  head  took  in  the  table  — 
"caramel  diet,  beginning  to  go  against  his  teeth  ?" 

"He  had  to  work  to-night,"  Rose  said.  "He  was  awfully 
sorry  he  couldn't  come." 

She  smiled  just  a  little  ironically  a*  the  said  it,  and  exag- 

JQnrl  DflR?Vln5 

LIBBftSY 


,  CHICAGO 


100  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

gerated  by  a  hair's  breadth,  perhaps,  the  purely  conventional 
nature  of  the  reply. 

"Yes,"  he  observed,  "that's  what  we  say.  Sometimes  it 
gets  us  off  and  sometimes  it  doesn't." 

"Well,  it  got  him  off  to-night,"  she  said.  "He  was  pretty 
impressive.  He  said  there  was  a  ruling  decision  against  him 
and  he  had  to  make  some  sort  of  distinction  so  that  the  de 
cision  wouldn't  rule.  Do  you  know  what  that  means?  I 
don't." 

"Why  didn't  you  ask  him?"  Randolph  wanted  to  know. 

"'I  did  and  he  said  he  could  explain  it,  but  that  it  would 
take  a  month.  So  of  course  there  wasn't  time." 

"I  thought,"  said  Eandolph,  "that  he  used  to  talk  law  to 
you  by  the  hour." 

The  button  wasn't  on  the  foil  that  time,  because  the  thrust 
brought  blood — a  bright  flush  into  her  cheeks  and  a  sudden 
brightness  into  her  eyes  that  would  have  induced  him  to  re 
lent  if  she  hadn't  followed  the  thing  up  of  her  own  accord. 

"I  wish  you'd  tell  me  something,"  she  said.  "I  expect  you 
know  better  than  any  one  else  I  could  ask.  Why  is  it  that  hus 
bands  and  wives  can't  talk  to  each  other?  With  people  who 
live  the  way  we  do,  it  isn't  that  they've  worn  each  other  out, 
because  they  see  no  more  of  each  other,  hardly,  than  they  do 
of  the  others.  And  it  isn't  that  they're  naturally  more  unin 
teresting  to  each  other  than  the  rest  of  the  people  they  know. 
Because  then,  why  did  they  marry  each  other  in  the  first  place, 
instead  of  any  one  of  the  others  who  are  so  easy  to  talk  to 
afterward?  Imagine  what  this  table  would  be  if  the  hus 
bands  and  wives  sat  side  by  side !  Would  Eleanor  ever  be  able 
to  turn  it  so  that  they  talked  that  way  ?" 

"That's  a  fascinating  speculation,"  he  said.  "I  wish  I  could 
persuade  her  some  time  to  indulge  the  wild  eccentricity  of  try 
ing  it  out." 

"Well,  why?"  she  demanded. 

"Shall  I  try  to  say  something  witty,"  he  asked,  "or  do  you 
want  it,  as  near  as  may  be,  absolutely  straight?" 

"Tret's  indulge,"  she  said,  "in  the  wild  eccentricity  of  talk 
ing  straight." 


LONG   CIRCUITS   AND    SHORT  101 

The  cigarettes  came  around  just  then,  and  he  lighted  one 
rather  deliberately,  at  one  of  the  candles,  before  he  answered. 

"I  am  under  the  impression/'  he  said,  "that  husbands  and 
wives  can  talk  exactly  as  well  as  any  other  two  people.  Ex 
actly  as  well,  and  no  better.  The  necessary  conditions  for  real 
conversation  are  a  real  interest  in  and  knowledge  of  a  com 
mon  subject;  ability  on  the  part  of  both  to  contribute  some 
thing  to  that  subject.  Well,  if  a  husband  and  wife  can 
meet  those  terms,  they  can  talk.  But  the  joker  is,  as  our  leg 
islative  friend  over  there  would  say,"  (he  nodded  down  the 
table  toward  a  }roung  millionaire  of  altruistic  principles,  who 
had  got  elected  to  the  state  assembly)  "the  joker  is  that  a 
man  and  a  woman  who  aren't  married,  and  who  are  moder 
ately  attracted  to  each  other,  can  talk,  or  seem  to  talk,  without 
meeting  those  conditions." 

"Seem  to  talk?"  she  questioned. 

"Seem  to  exchange  ideas  mutually.  They  think  they  do, 
but  they  don't.  It's  pure  illusion,  that's  the  answer." 

"I'm  not  clever,  really,"  said  Rose,  "and  I  don't  know 
much,  and  I  simply  don't  understand.  Will  you  explain  it, 
in  short  words," — she  smiled — "since  we're  not  married,  you 
know?" 

He  grinned  back  at  her.  "All  right,"  he  said,  "since  we're 
not  married,  I  will.  We'll  take  a  case  .  .  ."  He  looked 
around  the  table.  "We'll  be  discreet,"  he  amended,  "and  take 
a  hypothetical  case.  We'll  take  Darby  and  Joan.  They  en 
counter  each  other  somewhere,  and  something  about  them 
that  men  have  written  volumes  about  and  never  explained 
yet,  sets  up — you  might  almost  call  it  a  chemical  reaction  be 
tween  them — a  physical  reaction,  certainly.  They  arrest  each 
other's  attention — get  to  thinking  about  each  other,  are 
strongly  drawn  together. 

"It's  a  sex  attraction — not  quite  the  oldest  and  most  primi 
tive  thing  in  the  world,  but  nearly.  Only,  Darby  and  Joan 
aren't  primitive  people.  If  they  were,  the  attraction  would 
satisfy  itself  in  a  direct  primitive  way.  But  each  of  them  is 
carrying  a  perfectly  enormous  superstructure  of  ideas  and  in 
hibitions,  emotional  refinements  and  capacities,  and  the  sex 


102  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

attraction  is  so  disguised  that  they  don't  recognize  it.  Do  you 
know  what  a  short  circuit  is  in  electricity?" 

"I  think  so,"  said  Rose,  "but  you'd  better  not  take  a  chance. 
.Tell  me  that,  too." 

"Why,"  he  said,  "the  juice  that  comes  into  your  house  to 
light  it  and  heat  the  flat-irons  and  the  toaster,  and  so  on, 
conies  in  by  one  wire  and  goes  out  by  another.  Before  it  can 
get  out,  it's  got  to  do  all  the  work  you  want  it  to  do — push  its 
way  through  the  resistance  of  fine  tungsten  filaments  in  your 
lamps  and  the  iron  wires  in  your  heaters  that  get  white  hot 
resisting  it.  When  it's  pushed  its  way  through  all  of  them 
and  done  the  work  you  want  it  to  do,  it's  tired  out  and  goes 
away  by  the  other  wire.  But  if  you  cut  off  the  insulation 
down  in  the  basement,  where  those  two  wires  are  close  to 
gether,  and  make  it  possible  for  the  current  to  jump  straight 
across  without  doing  any  work,  it  will  take  the  short  circuit 
instead  of  the  long  one  and  you  won't  have  any  lights  in  your 
house.  Now  do  you  see  what  I  mean? 

"Darby  and  Joan  are  civilized.  That  is  to  say,  they're  in 
sulated.  The  current's  there,  but  it's  long-circuited.  The 
only  expression  it's  got  is  through  the  intelligence, — so  it 
lights  the  house.  Absence  of  common  knowledge  and  common 
interests  only  adds  to  the  resistance  and  makes  it  burn  all  the 
brighter.  Naturally  Darby  and  Joan  fall  victims  to  the  very 
dangerous  illusion  that  they're  intellectual  companions.  They 
think  they're  having  wonderful  talks.  All  they  are  doing,  is 
long-circuiting  their  sex  attraction.  Well,  marriage  gives  it  a 
short  circuit.  Why  should  the  current  light  the  lamps  when 
it  can  strike  straight  across  ?  There  you  are !" 

"And  poor  Joan,"  said  Rose,  after  a  palpable  silence,  but 
evenly  enough,  "who  has  thought  all  along  that  she  was  at 
tracting  a  man  by  her  intelligence  and  her  understanding, 
and  all  that,  wakes  up  to  find  that  she's  been  married  for  her 
long  eyelashes,  and  her  nice  voice — -and  her  pretty  ankles. 
That's  a  little  hard  on  her,  don't  you  think,  if  she's  been  tak 
ing  herself  seriously?" 

"Nine  times  in  ten,"  he  said,  "she's  fooling  herself.  She's 
taken  her  own  ankles  much  more  seriously  than  she  has  her 


LONG   CIECUITS   AND    SHORT  103 

mind.  She's  capable  of  real  sacrifices  for  them — for  her  sex 
charm,  that  is.  She'll  undergo  a  real  discipline  for  it.  In 
telligence  she  regards  as  a  gift.  She  thinks  the  witty  conver 
sation  she's  capable  of  after  dinner,  on  a  cocktail  and  two 
glasses  of  champagne,  or  the  bright  letters  she  can  write  to  a 
friend,  are  real  exercises  of  her  mind — real  work.  But  work 
isn't  done  like  that.  Work's  overcoming  something  that  re 
sists;  and  there's  strain  in  it,  and  pain  and  discouragement." 

In  her  cheeks  the  red  flared  up  brighter.  She  smiled  again 
— not  her  own  smile — one  at  any  rate  that  was  new  to  her. 

"You  don't  'solve  an  intellectual  problem'  then,"  she 
quoted,  "  'by  having  your  hand  held,  or  your  eyes  kissed  ?' '' 

Whereupon  he  shot  a  look  at  her  and  observed  that  evi 
dently  he  wasn't  as  much  of  a  pioneer  as  he  thought. 

She  did  not  rise  to  this  cast,  however.  "All  right,"  she 
said,  "admitting  that  her  ankles  are  serious  and  her  mind 
isn't,  what  is  Joan  going  to  do  about  it  ?" 

"It's  easier  to  say  what  she's  not  to  do,"  he  decided,  after 
hesitating  a  moment.  "Her  fatal  mistake  will  be  to  despise 
her  ankles  without  disciplining  her  mind.  If  she  will  take 
either  one  of  them  seriously,  or  both  for  that  matter — it's  pos 
sible — she'll  do  very  well." 

He  could,  no  doubt,  have  continued  on  the  theme  indefi 
nitely,  but  the  table  turned  the  other  way  just  then  and  Rose 
took  up  an  alleged  conversation  with  the  man  at  her  right 
which  lasted  until  they  left  the  table  and  included  such  topics 
as  indoor  golf,  woman's  suffrage,  the  new  dances,  Bernard 
Shaw,  Campanini  and  the  Progressive  party;  with,  a  perfectly 
appropriate  and  final  comment  on  each. 

Rose  didn't  care.  She  was  having  a  wonderful  time — a 
new  kind  of  wonderful  time.  No  longer  gazing,  big-eyed  like 
little  Cinderella  at  a  pageant  some  fairy  godmother's  whim 
had  admitted  her  to,  but  consciously  gazed  upon ;  she  was  the 
show  to-night,  and  she  knew  it.  Her  low,  finely  modulated 
voice  so  rich  in  humor,  so  varied  in  color,  had  to-night  an 
edge  on  it  that  carried  it  beyond  those  she  was  immediately 
speaking  to  and  drew  looks  that  found  it  hard  to  get  away 
again.  For  the  first  time  in  her  life,  with  full  self-conscious- 


104  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

ness,  she  was  producing  effects,  thrilling  with  the  exercise  of 
a  power  as  obedient  to  her  will  as  electricity  to  the  manipu 
lator  of  a  switchboard. 

She  was  like  a  person  driving  an  aeroplane,  able  to  move 
in  all  three  dimensions.  Pretty  soon,  of  course,  she'd  have 
to  come  back  to  earth,  where  certain  monstrously  terrifying 
questions  were  waiting  for  her. 

Madame  Greville's  final  apothegm  had  suggested  one  of 
them.  Was  all  she  valued  in  the  world  just  so  much  fairy  gold 
that  would  change  over  night  into  dry  leaves  in  her  treasure 
chest  because  she  had  never  earned  it — paid  the  price  for  it 
that  life  relentlessly  exacts  for  all  we  may  be  allowed  to  call 
ours  ? 

Her  tragi-comic  scene  with  Rodney  suggested  another. 
What  was  her  value  to  him  ?  Was  she  something  enormously 
desirable  when  he  wanted  his  hand  held  and  his  eyes  kissed, 
but  an  infernal  nuisance  when  serious  matters  were  con 
cerned?  A  fine  and  luxurious  dissipation,  not  dangerous  un 
less  recklessly  indulged  in,  but  to  be  kept  strictly  in  her 
place?  Before  her  talk  with  Randolph  she'd  have  laughed 
at  that. 

But  did  the  horrible  plausibility  of  what  he  had  said  ac 
tually  cover  the  truth  ?  Did  she  owe  that  first  golden  hour  with 
Rodney,  his  passionate  thrilling  avowal  of  his  life's  philoso 
phy,  to  nothing  deeper  in  herself  than  her  unconscious  power 
of  rousing  in  him  an  equally  unconscious,  primitive  sex  de 
sire?  Was  the  fine  mutuality  of  understanding  she  had  so 
proudly  boasted  to  her  mother  clear  illusion?  Xow  that  the 
short  circuit  had  been  established,  would  the  lights  never  burn 
in  the  upper  stories  of  their  house  again?  Turned  about 
conversely  the  question  read  like  this:  Was  the  thing  that 
had,  in  Randolph  himself,  aroused  his  vivid  interest  in  the 
subject — well,  nothing  more  than  the  daring  cut  of  her  gown, 
the  gleam  of  her  jewels,  the  whiteness  of  her  skin  .  .  .? 

Those  questions  were  waiting  for  her  to  come  back  to  earth  ; 
and  they  wouldn't  get  tired  and  go  away.  But  for  the  present 
the  knowledge  that  they  were  there  only  made  the  aeroplane 
ride  the  more  exhilarating. 


LOXG    CIRCUITS    AXD    SHORT  105 

She  was  called  to  the  telephone  just  as  she  was  on  the 
point  of  starting  reluctantly  for  home,  and  found  Rodney  on 
the  wire.  He  told  her  that  he  had  got  hold  of  the  thing  he 
was  looking  for,  but  that  there  were  still  hours  of  work  ahead 
of  him  while  he  was  fortifying  himself  with  necessary  au 
thorities.  He  wouldn't  come  home  to-night  at  all,  he  said. 
When  his  work  was  finished,  he'd  go  to  the  club  and  have  a 
Turkish  bath  and  all  the  sleep  he  had  time  for.  When  he  got 
through  in  court  to-morrow  afternoon,  he'd  come  home. 

It  was  all  perfectly  reasonable — it  was  to  her  finely  tuned 
ear  just  a  shade  too  reasonable.  It  had  been  thought  out  as 
an  excuse.  Because  it  wasn't  for  the  Turkish  bath  nor  the 
extra  hour's  sleep  that  he  was  staying  away  from  home.  It 
was  herself  he  was  staying  away  from.  He  wanted  his  mind 
to  stay  cold  and  taut,  and  he  was  afraid  to  face  the  tempta 
tion  of  her  eyes  and  her  soft  white  arms.  And  in  the  mood 
of  that  hour,  it  pleased  her  that  this  should  be  so — that  the 
ascetic  in  him  should  pay  her  the  tribute  of  fear. 

Afterward,  of  course,  she  felt  like  lashing  herself  for  hav 
ing  felt  like  that  and  for  having  replied,  in  a  spirit  of  pure 
coquetry,  in  a  voice  of  studied,  cool,  indifferent  good  humor : 

"That's  a  good  idea,  Roddy.  I'm  glad  you're  not  coming 
back.  Good  night." 


KODNEY    SMILED 

IT  was  with  a  reminiscent  smile  that  Rose  sat  down  before 
her  telephone  the  next  morning  and  called  a  number  from 
memory.  Less  than  a  year  ago,  it  had  been  such  a  thrilling 
adventure  to  call  the  number  of  that  fraternity  house  down 
at  the  university  and  ask,  in  what  she  conceived  to  be  a  busi 
nesslike  way,  for  Mr.  Haines.  And  then,  presently,  to  hear 
the  voice  of  the  greatest  half-back  the  varsity  had  boasted  of 
in  years,  saying  in  answer  to  her  "Hello,  Harry,"  "Hello, 
Rose." 

It  was  really  less  than  a  year,  and  yet  it  was  so  immensely 
long  ago,  judged  by  anything  but  the  calendar,  that  the  nat 
ural  way  to  think  of  him  was  as  a  married  man  with  a  family 
somewhere  and  faint  memories  of  the  days  when  he  was  a  stu 
dent  and  used  to  flirt  with  a  girl  called  Rose  something — 
Rose  Stanton,  that  was  it! 

It  was  during  one  of  the  interminable  waking  hours  of  last 
night  that  she  had  thought  of  the  half-back  as  a  person  who 
might  be  able,  and  willing,  to  do  her  the  service  she  wanted, 
and  she  had  spent  a  long  while  wondering  how  she  could  get 
track  of  him.  Then  the  logic  of  the  calendar  had  forced  the 
conviction  on  her,  that  he  was,  in  all  probability  still  at  the 
university,  dozing  through  recitations,  or  lounging  about  the 
corridors,  in  a  blue  serge  suit  and  a  sweater  with  a  C  on  it, 
waiting  for  some  other  girl  to  come  out  of  her  class-room; 
and  that  between  the  hours  of  ten-fifteen  and  eleven,  it  was 
altogether  likely  that  she'd  find  him  again,  as  she  had  so 
many  times  in  the  past,  at  his  fraternity  house,  going 
through  the  motions  of  getting  up  an  eleven  o'clock  recitation. 

It  was  absurd  enough  now  to  find  herself  calling  the  old 
number  and  asking  again  for  Mr.  Haines.  The  dreamlike  un- 

106 


RODNEY    SMILED  107 

reality  of  it  grew  stronger,  when  the  voice  that  answered  said, 
"Just  a  minute,"  and  then  bellowed  out  his  old  nickname — 
"Hello,  Tiny !  Phone !"  and,  after  a  wait,  she  heard  his  own 
very  deep  bass. 

"Hello.    What  is  it?" 

"Hello,  Harry,"  she  said.  "This  is  Eose  Aldrich.  Do  you 
remember  me? — Rose  Stanton,  you  know." 

The  ensuing  silence  was  so  long,  that  she  said  "Hello" 
again  to  make  sure  that  he  was  still  there. 

"Y — yes,"  he  said.  "Of — of  course  I  haven't  forgotten. 
I— I  only  ...  I  ..." 

She  wondered  what  he  was  so  embarrassed  about,  but  to 
save  the  situation,  she  interrupted. 

"Are  you  going  to  be  awfully  busy  this  afternoon?  Be 
cause,  if  you  aren't,  there's  something  you  can  do  for  me. 
You're  in  the  law  school  this  year,  aren't  you?" 

"Yes,"  he  said.    "Of  course  I'm  not  busy  at  all." 

"It'll  take  quite  a  little  while,"  she  warned  him,  "an  hour 
or  so,  and  I  don't  want  to  interfere  with  anything  you've  got 
to  do." 

Again  he  assured  her  that  he  hadn't  anything. 

"Well,  then,"  she  said  rather  dubiously,  because  his  voice 
Bounded  still  so  constrained  and  unnatural,  "I'll  come  down 
in  the  car  and  pick  you  up  about  half  past  one.  Is  that  all 
right?" 

"Yes,"  he  said.    "Yes,  of  course.    Thank  you  very  much." 

Had  inclination  led  Rose  to  do  a  little  imaginative  thinking 
about  the  half-back,  from  his  own  point  of  view,  she  might, 
without  much  trouble,  have  approximated  the  cause  of  his 
embarrassment. 

Here  is  a  poor  but  honest  young  man,  who  has  devoted  him 
self,  heart,  brain  and  good  right  arm,  to  the  service  of  a  beau 
tiful  young  fellow  student  at  the  university.  They  must  wait 
for  each  other,  of  course,  until  he  can  graduate  and  get  ad 
mitted  to  the  bar  and  make  a  success  that  will  enable  him  to 
support  her  as  she  deserves  to  be  supported.  The  girl  declines 
to  wait.  A  much  older  man — a  great,  trampling  brute  of  a 
man,  possessed  of  wealth  and  fame,  and  a  social  altitude  posi- 


108  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

tively  vertiginous — asks  her  to  marry  him.  She,  woman-weak, 
yields  to  the  temptation  of  all  the  gauds  and  baubles  that  go 
with  his  name,  and  marries  him.  Indeed,  few  young  men  at 
the  university  ever  have  as  valid  an  excuse  for  becoming 
broken-hearted  misogynists  as  the  half-back.  He  would  be 
faithful,  of  course,  though  she  was  not.  And  some  day,  years 
later,  it  might  be,  she  would  come  back  broken-hearted  to  him, 
confess  the  fatal  mistake  that  she  had  made;  seek  his  pro 
tection,  perhaps,  against  the  cruelties  of  the  monster  she  had 
come  to  hate.  He  would  forgive  her,  console  her — in  a  per 
fectly  moral  way,  of  course — and  for  a  while,  they  would  just 
be  friends.  Then  the  wicked  husband  would  conveniently 
die,  and  after  long  years,  they  could  find  happiness. 

It  made  a  very  pretty  idea  to  entertain  during  the  semi- 
somnolent  hours  of  dull  lectures  and  while  he  was  waiting 
for  the  last  possible  moment  to  leap  out  of  bed  in  the  morning 
and  make  a  dash  for  his  first  recitation.  "Written  down  on 
paper,  the  imaginary  conversation  between  them  would  have 
rilled  volumes. 

But  to  be  called  actually  to  the  telephone — she  had  tele 
phoned  to  him  a  thousand  times  in  the  dream — and  hear  her 
say,  just  as  in  the  dream  she  had  said — "This  is  Eose ;  do  you 
remember  me  ?"  was  enough  to  make  even  his  herculean  knees 
knock  together.  To  be  sure  her  voice  wasn't  choked  with  sobs, 
but  you  never  could  tell  over  the  telephone. 

What  did  she  want  to  do  ?  Confront  her  husband  with  him, 
perhaps,  this  very  afternoon,  and  say,  "Here  is  the  man  I 
love  ?"  And  what  would  he  do  then  ?  He'd  have  to  back  her 
up,  of  course — and  until  his  next  month's  allowance  came  in, 
he  had  only  a  dollar  and  eighty-five  cents  in  the  world! 

Eose  couldn't  have  filled  in  all  the  details,  of  course,  but 
she  might  have  approximated  the  final  result.  Indeed,  I  think 
she  had  done  so,  unconsciously,  by  half  past  one,  when  her 
car  stopped  in  front  of  the  fraternity  house  and,  instanta 
neously,  like  a  cuckoo  out  of  a  clock,  the  half-back  appeared. 
He  was  portentously  solemn,  and  Eose  thought  he  looked  a 
little  pale. 

"Get  in,"  she  said  holding  out  a  hand  to  him.    "I'm  going 


RODNEY    SMILED  109 

to  take  you  down-town  to  do  an  errand  for  me — well,  two 
errands,  really.  My,  but  it's  a  long  time  since  I've  seen  }rou  !" 

She  didn't  look  tragic,  to  be  sure — not  as  if  there  were 
livid  bruises  underneath  her  furs.  And  nothing  about  the 
manner  of  her  greeting  suggested  that  she  was  on  the  point 
of  sobbing  out  a  plea  to  be  forgiven.  Still,  what  did  she 
mean  by  an  errand?  It  might  be  anything. 

"You  see,"  she  explained,  "I  happened  to  remember  that 
you  were  going  to  begin  studying  law  this  year,  and  that  you 
were  just  the  person  who  wouldn't  mind  doing  what  I  want." 

"Divorce!"  thought  the  half-back  with  a  shudder. 

"I  want  you,"  she  went  on,  "to  tell  me  just  how  you  begin 
studying  law — what  text-books  you  get,  and  where  you  get 
them.  I  want  you  to  come  along  and  pick  them  out  for  me. 
You  see,  I've  decided  to  study  it  myself." 

It  was  a  fact  that  the  half-back  was  enormously  relieved. 
But  it  was  a  brutal  derisive  fact — an  unescapable  one.  He 
wasn't  heart-broken  over  the  dashing  of  a  suddenly  raised 
hope.  He  was,  in  his  heart  of  hearts,  saying,  "Thank  the 
Lord !" 

If  he  had  been  pale  before,  he  was  red  enough  now.  He 
felt  ridiculous  and  irritable. 

"Your  husband  knows  all  that  a  great  deal  better  than  I,  of 
course,"  he  said. 

"Yes,  of  course,"  Rose  was  thoughtless  enough  to  admit, 
"but  you  see,  I  don't  want  him  to  know."  She  flushed  a  little 
herself.  "It's  going  to  be  a — surprise  for  him,"  she  said. 

"And,  after  we've  got  the  books,"  she  went  on,  "I  want  you 
to  do  something  else.  He's  making  an  argument  in  court  to 
day,  and  I  want  to  go  and  hear  him.  Only — I'm  so  ignorant, 
you  see,  I  don't  know  how  to  do  it  and  I  didn't  want  to  tell 
him  I  was  going.  So  you're  to  find  out  where  the  court  room 
is  and  how  to  get  me  in.  Now,  tell  me  all  about  everything 
and  what's  been  happening  since  I  went  away.  I  saw  you 
made  the  all-American  last  fall,  and  meant  to  write  you  a 
note  about  it,  but  I  didn't  get  a  chance.  That  was  great !" 

But  even  at  this  new  angle,  the  talk  didn't  run  smoothly. 
Because,  precisely  as  the  half-back  forgot  his  terrors  and 


110  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

the  hopes  that  had  prompted  them,  and  the  absurdity  of  both 
— precisely  as  he  began  to  feel,  after  all,  that  it  was  a  very 
superb  and  grown-up  thing  to  be  a  familiar  friend  of  a  mar 
ried  woman  with  a  limousine  and  a  respectful  chauffeur,  and 
wonderful  clothes  and  an  air  of  taking  them  all  for  granted — 
precisely  as  he  made  up  his  mind  to  this,  he  became  so  very 
mature,  and  wise  and  blase,  modeled  his  manners  and  his  con 
versation  so  strictly  on  John  Drew  in  his  attempt  to  rise  to 
the  situation,  that  the  schoolboy  topics  she  suggested  froze  on 
his  tongue.  So  that,  by  the  time  he  had  picked  out  the  books 
for  her  and  seen  them  stowed  away  in  the  car,  and  then  had 
telephoned  Rodney's  office  to  find  what  court  he  was  appearing 
before,  and  finally  taken  her  up  to  the  eighth  floor  in  the 
Federal  Building  and  left  her  there,  she  was,  though  grateful, 
distinctly  glad  to  be  rid  of  him. 

What  heightened  this  feeling  was  that  just  as  she  caught 
herself  smiling  a  little,  down  inside,  over  his  callow  absurdity, 
she  reflected  that  a  year  ago  they  had  been  equals;  that,  as 
far  as  actual  intelligence  went,  he  was  no  doubt  her  equal  to 
day — her  superior,  perhaps.  He'd  gone  on  studying  and  she 
hadn't.  Except  for  the  long-circuited  sex  attraction  that 
Doctor  Randolph  had  been  talking  about  last  night,  he  was 
as  capable  of  being  an  intellectual  companion  to  her  husband 
as  she  was.  That  idea  stung  the  red  of  resolution  into  her 
cheeks.  She  would  study  law.  She'd  study  it  with  all  her 
might ! 

She  was  successful  in  her  project  of  slipping  into  the  rear 
of  the  court  room  without  attracting  her  husband's  attention, 
and  for  two  hours  and  a  half,  she  listened  with  mingled  feel 
ings,  to  his  argument.  A  good  part  of  the  time  she  was  occu 
pied  in  fighting  off,  fiercely,  an  almost  overwhelming  drowsi 
ness.  The  court  room  was  hot  of  course,  the  glare  from  the 
skylight  pressed  down  her  eyelids;  she  hadn't  slept  much  the 
night  before.  And  then,  there  was  no  use  pretending  that 
she  could  follow  her  husband's  reasoning.  Listening  to  it  had 
something  the  same  effect  on  her  as  watching  some  enormous, 
complicated,  smooth-running  mass  of  machinery.  She  was 


EODNEY   SMILED  111 

conscious  of  the  power  of  it,  though  ignorant  of  what  made  it 
go,  and  of  what  it  was  accomplishing. 

The  three  stolid  figures  behind  the  high  mahogany  bench 
seemed  to  be  following  it  attentively,  though  they  irritated 
her  bitterly,  sometimes,  by  indulging  in  whispered  conversa 
tions.  Toward  the  end,  though,  as  Eodney  opened  the  last 
phase  of  his  argument,  one  of  them,  the  youngest — a  man  with 
a  thick  neck  and  a  square  head — hunched  forward  and  inter 
rupted  him  with  a  question ;  evidently  a  penetrating  one,  for 
the  man  sitting  across  the  table  from  Eodney  looked  up  and 
grinned,  and  interjected  a  remark  of  his  own. 

"I  simply  followed  the  cases  cited  in  Aldrich  on  Quasi  Con 
tracts,"  he  said.  "I  have  a  copy  of  the  work  here,  in  case 
Mr.  Aldrich  didn't  bring  one  along  himself,  which  I'd  be  glad 
to  submit  to  the  Court." 

Eose  gasped.  It  was  his  own  book  they  were  quoting  against 
him. 

"I  propose  to  show,"  said  Eodney,  "if  the  Court  please,  that 
an  absolutely  vital  distinction  is  to  be  made  between  the  cases 
cited  in  the  section  of  Aldrich  on  Quasi  Contracts,  which  my 
honorable  opponent  refers  to,  and  the  case  before  the  Court." 

Then  the  other  judges  spoke  up.  They  knew  the  cases,  it 
appeared,  and  didn't  want  to  look  at  the  book,  but  it  was 
clear  that  they  were  skeptical  about  the  distinction.  For  five 
minutes  the  formal  argument  was  lost  in  swift  flashing 
phrases  in  which  everybody  took  a  part.  Eodney  was  defend 
ing  himself  against  them  all.  And  Eose,  in  an  agony  because 
she  couldn't  understand  it,  was  reminded,  grotesquely  enough, 
of  the  Gentleman  of  France,  or  some  other  of  the  sword-and- 
cloak  heroes  of  her  girlhood,  defending  the  head  of  the  stair 
way  against  the  simultaneous  assault  of  half  a  dozen  enemies. 
And  then  suddenly  it  was  over.  The  judges  settled  back 
again,  the  argument  went  on. 

At  half  past  four,  the  oldest  judge,  who  sat  in  the  middle, 
interrupted  again  to  tell  Eodney,  with  what  seemed  to  Eose 
brutally  bad  manners,  what  time  it  was. 

"If  you  can  finish  your  argument  in  fifteen  minutes,  Mr. 


113  THE    REAL   ADVEXTURE 

Aldrich,  we'll  hear  you  out.  If  it's  going  to  take  longer  than 
that,  the  Court  will  adjourn  till  to-morrow  morning." 

"I  don't  think  I  shall  want  more  than  fifteen  minutes,"  said 
Rodney,  and  he  went  on  again. 

And,  presently,  he  just  stopped  talking  and  began  stacking 
up  his  notes.  The  oldest  judge  mumbled  something,  every 
body  stood  up  and  the  three  stiff  formidable  figures  filed  out 
by  a  side  door.  It  was  all  over. 

But  nothing  had  happened! 

Eose  had  been  looking  forward,  you  see,  to  a  driving  finish ; 
to  a  dramatic  summoning  of  reserves,  a  mighty  onslaught. 
And  at  the  end  of  it,  as  from  the  umpire  at  a  ball  game,  to 
a  decision.  She  had  expected  to  leave  the  court  room  in  the 
blissful  knowledge  of  Rodney's  victory  or  the  tragic  acceptance 
of  his  defeat.  In  her  surprise  over  the  failure  of  this  climax 
to  materialize,  she  almost  neglected  to  make  her  escape  before 
he  discovered  her  there. 

One  practical  advantage  she  had  gained  out  of  what  was,  on 
the  whole,  a  rather  unsatisfactory  afternoon.  When  she  had 
gone  home  and  changed  into  the  sort  of  frock  she  thought  he'd 
like  and  come  down-stairs  in  it  in  answer  to  his  shouted 
greeting  from  the  lower  hall,  she  didn't  say,  as  otherwise 
she  would  have  done,  "How  did  it  come  out,  Roddy?  Did 
you  win?" 

In  the  light  of  her  newly-acquired  knowledge,  she  could 
see  how  a  question  of  that  sort  would  irritate  him.  Instead 
of  that,  she  said :  "You  dear  old  boy,  how  dog  tired  you  must 
be!  How  do  you  think  it  went?  Do  you  think  you  im 
pressed  them?  I  bet  you  did." 

And  not  having  been  rubbed  the  wrong  way  by  a  foolish 
question,  he  held  her  off  with  both  hands  for  a  moment,  then 
hugged  her  up  and  told  her  she  was  a  trump. 

"I  had  a  sort  of  uneasy  feeling,"  he  confessed,  "that  after 
last  night — the  way  I  threw  you  out  of  my  office,  fairly,  I'd 
find  you — tragic.  I  might  have  known  I  could  count  on  you. 
Lord,  but  it's  good  to  have  you  like  this !  Is  there  anywhere 
we  have  got  to  go  ?  Or  can  we  just  stay  home  ?" 

He  didn't  want  to  flounder  through  an  emotional  morass, 


RODNEY    SMILED  113 

you  see.  A  firm  smooth-bearing  surface,  that  was  what,  for 
every-day  use,  he  wanted  her  to  provide  him  with;  lightly 
given,  casual  caresses  that  could  be  accepted  with  a  smile, 
pleasantness,  a  confident  security  that  she  wouldn't  be 
"tragic."  And  on  the  assumption  that  she  couldn't  walk 
beside  him  on  the  main  path  of  his  life,  it  was  just  and 
sensible.  But  it  wasn't  good  enough  for  Rose. 

So  the  very  next  morning,  she  stripped  the  cover  off  the 
first  of  the  books  the  half-back  had  picked  out  for  her,  and 
really  went  to  work.  She  bit  down,  angrily,  the  yawns  that 
blinded  her  eyes  with  tears;  she  made  desperate  efforts  to 
flog  her  mind  into  grappling  with  the  endless  succession  of 
meaningless  pages  spread  out  before  her,  to  find  a  germ  of 
meaning  somewhere  in  it  that  would  bring  the  dead  verbiage 
to  life.  She  tried  to  recall  the  thrill  in  Rodney's  voice  when 
he  had  told  her,  on  that  wonderful  wind-swept  afternoon,  that 
the  law  was  the  finest  profession  in  the  world.  Also,  he  had 
told  her,  he'd  never  been  bored  with  it — it  was  immoral  to  be 
bored.  It  was  a  confession  of  defeat,  anyway,  she  could  see 
that.  And  she  wouldn't — she  absolutely  would  not  be  de 
feated. 

In  a  variety  of  moods  which  included  everything  except  real 
hope  and  confidence,  she  kept  the  thing  up  for  weeks — didn't 
give  up  indeed,  until  Fate  stepped  in,  in  her  ironic  way,  and 
took  the  decision  out  of  her  hands.  She  was  very  secretive 
about  it;  developed  an  almost  morbid  fear  that  Rodney  would 
discover  what  she  was  doing  and  laugh  his  big  laugh  at  her. 
She  resisted  innumerable  questions  she  wanted  to  propound 
to  him,  from  a  fear  that  they'd  betray  her  secret. 

She  even  forbore  to  ask  him  about  the  case — it  was  The 
Case  in  her  mind — the  one  she  knew  about,  and  as  she  strug 
gled  along  with  her  heavy  text-books,  and  a  realization  grew 
in  her  mind  of  the  countless  hours  of  such  struggling  on  his 
part  which  must  have  lain  behind  his  ability  to  make  that 
argument  that  day,  the  thing  accumulated  importance  to  her. 
How  could  he,  under  the  suspense  of  waiting  for  that  decision, 
concentrate  his  mind  on  anything  else  ? 

She  discovered  in  the  newspaper  one  day,  a  column  sum- 


114:        THE  BEAU  ADVENTURE 

mary  of  court  decisions  that  had  been  handed  down,  and 
though  The  Case  wasn't  in  it,  she  kept,  from  that  day  forward, 
a  careful  watch — discovered  where  the  legal  news  was  printed, 
and  never  overlooked  a  paragraph.  And  at  last  she  found  it 
— just  the  bare  statement  "Judgment  affirmed."  Rodney,  she 
knew,  had  represented  the  appellant.  He  was  beaten. 

For  a  moment  the  thing  bruised  her  like  a  blow.  She  had 
never  succeeded  in  entertaining,  seriously,  the  possibility  that 
it  could  end  otherwise  than  in  victory  for  him.  She  read  it 
again  and  made  sure.  She  remembered  the  names  of  both 
parties  to  the  suit,  and  she  knew  which  side  Rodney  was  on. 
There  couldn't  be  any  mistake  about  it.  And  the  certainty 
weighed  down  her  spirits  with  a  leaden  depression. 

And  then,  all  at  once,  in  the  indrawing  of  a  single  breath, 
she  saw  it  differently.  Now  that  it  had  happened — and  she 
couldn't  help  its  happening — didn't  it  give  her,  after  all,  the 
very  opportunity  she  wanted?  She  remembered  what  he  had 
said  the  night  he  had  turned  her  out  of  his  office.  He  wasn't 
sick  or  discouraged.  He  was  in  an  intellectual  quandary 
that  couldn't  be  solved  by  having  his  hand  held  or  his  eyes 
kissed. 

She  saw  now,  that  that  had  been  just  enough.  She  couldn't 
help  him  out  of  his  intellectual  quandaries — yet.  But  under 
the  discouragement  and  lassitude  of  defeat,  couldn't  she  help 
him  ?  She  remembered  how  many  times  she  had  gone  to  him 
for  help  like  that.  In  panicky  moments  when  the  new  world 
she  had  been  transplanted  into  seemed  terrible  to  her;  in 
moments  when  she  feared  she  had  made  hideous  mistakes; 
and,  most  notably,  during  the  three  or  four  days  of  an  acute 
illness  of  her  mother's,  when  she  had  been  brought  face  to 
face  with  the  monstrous,  incredible  possibility  of  losing  her, 
how  she  had  clung  to  him,  how  his  tenderness  had  soothed 
and  quieted  her — how  his  strength  and  steady  confidence  had 
run  through  her  veins  like  wine ! 

He  had  never  come  to  her  like  that.  She  knew  now  it  was 
a  thing  she  had  unconsciously  longed  for.  And  to-night  she'd 
have  a  chance !  Oddly  enough,  it  turned  out  to  be  the  hap 
piest  day  she'd  known  in  a  long  while.  There  was  a  mounting 


RODNEY    SMILED  115 

excitement  in  her,  as  the  hours  passed — a  thrilling  suspense. 
Perhaps,  after  all,  it  wasn't  going  to  be  necessary  to  grind 
through  all  those  law-books  in  order  to  win  the  place  beside 
him  that  she  wanted.  If  she  could  comfort  him — mother  him 
in  his  defeat  and  discouragement — hold  him  fast  when  his 
world  reeled  around  him,  that  would  be  the  basis  of  a  better 
companionship  than  mere  ability  to  chop  legal  logic  with  him. 
She  could  be  content  with  the  shallow  sparkle  of  the  stream  of 
their  life  together,  if  it  deepened,  now  and  then,  into  still 
pools  like  this. 

She  resisted  the  impulse  to  call  him  up  on  the  tele 
phone,  and  a  stronger  one  to  go  straight  to  him  at  his  office. 
She'd  wait  until  he  came  home  to  her.  She  had  been  feeling 
wretched  lately — headachy,  nervous,  sickish ; — probably,  she 
thought,  from  staying  in  the  house  too  much  and  bending 
over  her  heavy  law-books.  Perhaps  she  had  strained  her  eyes. 
But  to-day  these  discomforts  were  forgotten.  Every  little 
while  she  straightened  up  and  stood  at  an  open  window  draw 
ing  in  long  breaths.  He  should  see  her  at  her  best  to-night — 
serene — triumphant.  The  pallor  of  her  cheeks  he  had  com 
mented  on  lately,  shouldn't  be  there  to  trouble  him. 

For  two  hours  that  afternoon,  she  listened  for  his  latch-key, 
and  when  at  last  she  heard  it  she  stole  down  the  stairs.  He 
didn't  shout  her  name  from  the  hall,  as  he  often  did.  He 
didn't  hear  her  coming,  and  she  got  a  look  at  his  face  as  he 
stood  at  the  table  absently  turning  over  some  mail  that  lay 
there.  He  looked  tired,  she  thought. 

He  saw  her  when  she  reached  the  lower  landing,  but  for 
just  a  fraction  of  a  second  his  gaze  left  her  and  went  back  to 
the  letter  he  held  in  his  hand,  as  if  to  satisfy  himself  it  was  of 
no  importance  before  he  tossed  it  away.  Then  he  came  to 
meet  her 

"Oh !"  he  said.  "I  thought  you  were  going  to  be  off  some 
where  with  Frederica  this  afternoon.  It's  been  a  great  day. 
I  hope  you  haven't  spent  the  whole  of  it  indoors.  You're  look 
ing  great,  anyway.  Come  here  and  give  me  a  kiss/' 

Because  she  had  hesitated,  a  little  perplexed.  Did  he  mean 
not  to  tell  her — to  "spare"  her,  as  he'd  have  said?  The  kiss 


116  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

she  gave  had  a  different  quality  from  those  that  ordinarily 
constituted  her  greetings,  and  the  arms  that  went  round  his 
neck,  didn't  give  him  their  customary  hug.  But  they  stayed 
there. 

"You  poor  dear  old  boy !"  she  said.  And  then,  "Don't  you 
care,  Roddy!" 

He  returned  the  caress  with  interest,  before  he  seemed  to 
realize  the  different  significance  of  it.  Then  he  pushed  her 
away  by  the  shoulders  and  held  her  where  he  could  look  into 
her  face. 

"What  do  you  mean?"  he  asked.    "Don't  care  about  what?" 

It  didn't  seem  like  bravado — like  an  acted  out  pretense,  and 
yet  of  course  it  must  be. 

"Don't,"  she  said.  "Because  I  know.  I've  known  all  day. 
I  read  it  in  the  paper  this  morning." 

From  puzzled  concern,  the  look  in  his  face  took  on  a  deeper 
intensity.  "Tell  me  what  it  is,"  he  said  very  quietly.  "I  don't 
know.  I  didn't  read  the  paper  this  morning.  Is  it  Harriet  ?" 
Harriet  was  his  other  sister — married,  and  not  very  happily, 
it  was  beginning  to  appear,  to  an  Italian  count. 

A  revulsion — a,  sort  of  sick  misgiving  took  the  color  out  of 
Rose's  cheeks. 

"It  isn't  any  one,"  she  said.  "It's  nothing  like  that.  It's — 
it's  that  case."  Her  lips  stumbled  over  the  title  of  it.  "It's 
been  decided  against  you.  Didn't  you  know  ?" 

For  a  moment  his  expression  was  simply  the  absence  of  all 
expression  whatever.  "Good  lord !"  he  murmured.  Then, 
"But  how  the  dickens  did  you  know  anything  about  it?  How 
did  you  happen  to  see  it  in  the  paper?  How  did  you  know 
the  title  of  it?" 

"I  was  in  the  court  the  day  you  argued  it,"  she  said  un 
evenly.  "And  when  I  found  they  printed  those  things  in  the 
paper,  I  kept  watch.  And  to-day  ..." 

"Why,  you  dear  child!"  he  said.  And  the  queer  ragged 
quality  of  his  voice  drew  her  eyes  back  to  his,  so  that  she  saw, 
wonderingly,  that  they  were  bright  with  tears.  "And  you 
never  said  a  word,  and  you've  been  bothering  your  dear  little 
head  about  it  all  the  time.  Why,  you  darling !" 


RODNEY    SMILED  117 

He  sat  down  on  the  edge  of  the  table,  and  pulled  her  up 
tight  into  his  arms  again.  She  was  glad  to  put  her  head  down 
— didn't  want  to  look  at  his  face ;  she  knew  that  there  was  a 
smile  there  along  with  the  tears. 

"And  you  thought  I  was  worrying  about  it/'  he  persisted, 
"and  that  I'd  be  unhappy  because  I  was  beaten?"  He  patted 
her  shoulder  consolingly  with  a  big  hand.  "But  that's  all  in 
the  day's  work,  child.  I'm  beaten  somewhere  nearly  as  often 
as  I  win.  And  really,  down  inside,  leaving  out  a  little  superfi 
cial  pleasure,  I  don't  care  a  damn  whether  I  win  or  lose.  A  man 
couldn't  be  any  good  as  a  law}rer,  if  he  did  care,  any  more  than 
a  surgeon  could  be  any  good  if  he  did.  You've  got  to  keep  a 
cold  mind  or  you  can't  do  your  best  work.  And  if  you've  done 
your  best  work,  there's  nothing  to  care  about.  I  honestly 
haven't  thought  about  the  thing  once  from  that  day  to  this. 
Don't  you  see  how  it  is  ?" 

He  couldn't  see  how  it  was,  that  was  plain  enough.  What 
he  very  reasonably  expected  was  that  after  so  lucid  an  expla 
nation,  she  would  turn  her  wet  face  up  to  his,  with  her  old 
wide  smile  on  it.  But  that  was  not  what  happened  at  all. 
Instead,  she  just  went  limp  in  his  arms,  and  the  sobs  that 
shook  her  seemed  to  be  meeting  no  resistance  whatever.  It 
wasn't  like  her  to  work  herself  up  in  that  way  over  trifles, 
either;  yet,  surely  a  trifle  was  all  this  could  be  called — a  laugh 
able  mistake  he  couldn't  help  loving  her  for,  or  a  touching 
demonstration  of  affection  that  he  couldn't  help  smiling  at. 
Either  way  you  took  it,  it  was  nothing  to  make  a  scene  about. 
Where  was  her  sense  of  humor  ?  That  was  the  thing  to  do — 
get  her  quiet  first,  and  then  persuade  her  to  laugh  at  the 
whole  affair  with  him. 

He  was  saved  from  carrying  out  this  program  by  the  fact 
that  Rose,  of  her  own  accord,  anticipated  him.  At  least  she 
controlled,  rather  suddenly,  her  sobs,  sat  up,  wiped  her  eyes 
and,  after  a  fashion,  smiled.  Not  at  him,  though;  resolutely 
away  from  him,  he  might  almost  have  thought — as  if  she 
didn't  want  him  to  see. 

"That's  right,"  he  said,  craning  round  to  make  sure  that  the 
smile  was  there.  "Have  a  look  at  the  funny  side  of  it." 


118  THE    KEAL   ADVENTURE 

She  winced  at  that  as  from  a  blow  and  pulled  herself  away 
from  him.  Then  she  controlled  herself  and,  in  answer  to  his 
look  of  troubled  amazement,  said : 

"It's  all  right.  Only  it  happens  that  you're  the  one  who 
d-doesn't  know  how  awfully  funny  it  really  is."  Her  voice 
shook,  but  she  got  it  in  hand  again.  "jSTo,  I  don't  mean  any 
thing  by  that.  Here !  Give  me  a  kiss  and  then  let  me  wash 
my  face." 

And  for  the  whole  evening,  and  again  next  morning  until 
he  left  the  house,  she  managed  to  keep  him  in  the  only  half- 
questioning  belief  that  nothing  was  the  matter. 

It  was  about  an  hour  after  that,  that  her  maid  came  into 
her  bedroom,  where  she  had  had  her  breakfast,  and  said  that 
Miss  Stanton  wanted  to  see  her. 


CHAPTEE  VI 

THE  DAMASCUS  ROAD 

IT  argued  no  real  lack  of  sisterly  affection  that  Rose  didn't 
want  to  see  Portia  that  morning.  Even  if  there  had  been  no 
other  reason,  being  found  in  bed  at  half  past  ten  in  the  morn 
ing  by  a  sister  who  inflexibly  opened  her  little  shop  at  half 
past  eight,  regardless  of  bad  weather,  backaches  and  other  po 
tentially  valid  excuses,  was  enough  to  make  one  feel  apolo 
getic  and  worthless.  Eose  could  truthfully  say  that  she  was 
feeling  wretched.  But  Portia  would  sit  there,  slim  and  erect, 
in  a  little  straight-backed  chair,  and  whatever  perfunctory 
commiseration  she  might  manage  to  express,  the  look  of  her 
fine  eyebrows  would  be  skeptical.  Justly,  too.  Eose  could 
never  deny  that.  Not  so  long  as  she  could  remember  the  in 
numerable  times  when  she  had  yielded  to  her  mother's  per 
suasions  that  she  was  over-tired  and  that  a  morning  in  bed 
was  just  what  she  needed.  Portia,  so  far  as  she  could  remem 
ber,  had  never  been  the  subject  of  these  persuasions. 

But  this  was  only  the  beginning  of  Eose's  troubles  to-day. 
She  was  paying  the  price  of  yesterday's  exaltation  and  her 
spirits  had  sunk  down  to  nowhere.  What  a  fool's  paradise 
yesterday  had  been  with  its  vision  of  her  big  self-sufficient 
husband  coming  to  her  for  mothering  because  he  had  lost  a 
law-suit!  What  a  piece  of  mordant  irony  it  was,  that  she 
should  have  found  herself,  after  all  her  silly  hopes,  sobbing  in 
his  arms,  while  he  comforted  her  for  her  bitter  disappoint 
ment  over  not  being  able  to  comfort  him !  She  had  told  the 
truth  when  she  said  he  was  the  one,  really,  who  didn't  know 
how  funny  it  was. 

Well,  and  wasn't  her  other  effort  just  as  ridiculous?  If 
ever  he  found  her  heap  of  law-books  and  learned  of  the 
wretched  hours  she  had  spent  trying  to  discover  what  they 

119 


120  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

were  all  about  in  the  hope  of  promoting  herself  to  a  true  in 
tellectual  companionship  with  him,  wouldn't  he  take  the  dis 
covery  in  exactly  the  same  way — be  touched  by  the  childish 
futility  of  it  and  yet  amused  at  the  same  time — cuddle  her 
indulgently  in  his  arms  and  soothe  her  disappointment ; — and 
then  urge  her  to  look  at  the  funny  side  of  it  ?  He  must  know 
hundreds  of  practising  lawyers.  Were  there  a  dozen  out  of 
them  all  whose  minds  had  the  power  to  stimulate  and  bring 
into  action  the  full  powers  of  his  own  ? 

Well  then,  what  was  the  use  of  trying  ?  If  James  Eandolph 
was  right — and  it  seemed  absurd  to  question  it — she  had  just 
one  charm  for  her  husband — the  charm  of  sex.  To  that  she 
owed  her  hours  of  simulated  companionship  with  him,  his 
tenderness  for  her,  his  willingness  to  make  her  pleasures  his 
own.  To  that  she  owed  the  extravagantly  pretty  clothes  he 
was  always  urging  her  to  buy — the  house  he  kept  her  in — 
the  servants  he  paid  to  wait  on  her.  Well  then,  why  not  make 
the  best  of  it? 

Only,  if  she  went  on  much  longer,  feeling  sick  and  faded 
like  this,  she'd  have  nothing  left  to  make  the  most  of,  and 
then  where  would  she  be  ? 

Oh,  she  was  getting  maudlin,  and  she  knew  it !  And  when 
she  got  over  feeling  so  weak  and  giddy,  she'd  brace  up  and  be 
herself  again.  But  for  the  present,  she  didn't  feel  like  seeing 
Portia. 

But  Rose's  shrinking  from  a  talk  with  Portia  that  morn 
ing  was  a  mild  feeling  compared  with  Portia's  dread  of  the 
impending  talk  with  Rose.  Twice  she  had  walked  by  the 
perfect  doorway  of  the  McCrea  house  before  she  entered  it; 
ostensibly  to  give  herself  a  little  more  time  to  think — really, 
because  she  shrank  from  the  ordeal  that  awaited  her  in  there. 

Her  sister's  menage  had  been  a  source  of  irritation  to  Por 
tia  ever  since  it  was  established,  though  a  deeper  irritation 
was  her  own  with  herself  for  allowing  it  to  affect  her  thus. 
Rose's  whole-hearted  plunge  into  the  frivolities  of  a  social 
season,  her  outspoken  delight  in  it,  her  finding  in  it,  appar 
ently,  a  completely  satisfactory  solution  to  the  problem  of 
existence,  couldn't  fail  to  arouse  Portia's  ironic  smile.  This 


THE   DAMASCUS   EOAD  121 

was  the  sort  of  vessel  her  mother  had  freighted  with  her 
hopes !  This  was  the  course  she  steered. 

She  had  fought  this  feeling  with  a  bitter  self-contempt. 
The  trouble  with  her  was,  she  told  herself  in  icy  self-commun- 
ings,  that  she  envied  Eose  her  happiness,  her  opportunities, 
her  husband — even  her  house.  Why  should  all  that  wonderful 
furniture  have  been  wasted  on  Eose,  to  whom  a  perfect  old 
Jacobean  gate-legged  table  was  nothing  but  a  surface  to  drop 
anything  on  that  she  wanted  out  of  her  hands  ?  Why  should 
a  man  of  Eodney's  powerful  intelligence  waste  his  time  on 
her  frivolous  amusements,  content,  apparently,  just  to  sit  and 
gaze  at  her,  oblivious  of  any  one  else  who  might  happen 
to  be  about?  She  knew  that  she,  Portia,  out  of  her  dis 
ciplined  experience  of  life,  and  her  real  eagerness  for  knowl 
edge  of  it,  was  better  able  to  challenge  the  attention  of  his 
mind  than  Eose.  And  yet  she  had  never  really  got  it.  She 
remained  half  invisible  to  him — some  one  to  be  remembered 
with  a  start,  after  an  interval  of  oblivion,  and  treated  con 
siderately — even  affectionately,  for  that  matter — as  Eose's 
sister ! 

They  had  been  seeing  each  other  with  reasonable  frequency 
all  winter.  The  Aldriches  had  Portia  and  her  mother  in  to 
a  family  dinner  pretty  often,  and  always  came  out  to  Edge- 
water  for  a  one-o'clock  dinner  with  the  Stantons  on  Sunday. 
The  habit  was  for  Eose  to  come  out  early  in  the  car  and  take 
them  to  church,  while  Eodney  walked  out  later,  and  turned 
up  in  time  for  dinner. 

Mrs.  Stanton  had  taken  a  great  liking  to  Eodney.  His 
manner  toward  her  had  just  the  blend  of  deference  and  breezy 
unconventionally  that  pleased  her.  So,  while  Portia  would 
worry  through  the  dinner,  for  fear  it  wouldn't  be  cooked  well 
enough,  or  served  well  enough,  not  to  present  a  sorry  con 
trast  to  the  meals  her  guests  were  accustomed  to,  her  mother 
would  sit  beaming  upon  the  pair  with  a  contentment  as  un 
alloyed  as  if  Eose  were  the  acknowledged  new  leader  of  the 
great  Cause  and  her  husband  her  adoring  convert,  as  they  had 
been  in  her  old  day-dream. 

As  far  as  Eodney  went,  the  dream  might  have  been  true, 


122 

for  he  showed  an  unending  interest  in  the  Woman  Movement 
— never  tired  of  drawing  from  his  mother-in-law  the  story 
of  her  labors  and  the  exposition  of  her  beliefs.  Sometimes  he 
argued  with  her  playfully  in  order  to  get  her  started.  More 
often,  and  as  far  as  Portia  could  see,  quite  seriously,  he  pro 
fessed  himself  in  full  accord  with  her  views. 

After  this  had  been  going  on  for  about  so  long,  Rose  would 
yawn  and  stretch  and  sit  down  on  the  arm  of  her  mother's 
chair,  begin  stroking  her  hair  and  offering  her  all  manner  of 
quaint  unexpected  caresses.  And  then,  pretty  soon,  Rodney's 
attention  to  the  subject  would  begin  to  wander  and  at  last  flag 
altogether  and  leave  him  stranded,  gazing  and  unable  to  do 
anything  but  gaze,  at  the  lovely  creature — the  still  miraculous 
creature,  who,  when  he  got  her  home  again,  would  come  and 
sit  on  the  arm  of  his  chair  like  that!  When  this  happened, 
Portia  found  it  hard  to  stay  in  the  room. 

Until  Mrs.  Stanton's  terrifying  illness  along  in  January, 
these  meetings  constituted  the  whole  of  the  intercourse  be 
tween  the  families.  Rose  had  done  her  best  to  carry  Portia  with 
her,  to  some  extent  at  least,  into  her  new  life — to  introduce 
her  to  her  new  friends  and  make  her,  as  far  as  might  be,  one  of 
them.  And  in  this  she  was  seconded  very  amiably,  by  Fred- 
erica.  But  Portia  had  put  down  a  categorical  veto  on  all  these 
attempts.  She  hadn't  the  inclination  nor  the  energy,  she  said, 
and  her  mother  needed  all  the  time  she  could  spare  away  from 
her  business.  Once,  when  Eose  pressed  the  matter,  she  gave  a 
more  genuine  reason.  Eose's  new  friends,  she  said,  would 
regard  her  introduction  to  them  solely  as  a  bid  for  business. 
She  didn't  want  them  coming  around  to  her  place  to  buy  their 
wedding  presents  "in  order  to  help  out  that  poor  old  maid 
Bister  of  Rose  Aldrich's."  She  was  getting  business  enough  in 
legitimate  ways. 

Sometimes  she  told  herself  that  if  Rose  had  really  wanted 
her,  she'd  have  pressed  the  matter  harder — wouldn't  have 
given  up  unless  she  was  clutching  with  real  relief  at  an  excuse 
that  let  her  out  of  an  embarrassment.  But  at  other  times  she 
accused  herself  of  having  acted  in  a  petty  snobbish  spirit  in  de 
clining  the  chance  not  only  for  pleasant  new  friendships,  espe- 


THE   DAMASCUS   ROAD  123 

cially  Frederica's,  but  for  a  closer  association  with  her  sister. 
Well,  the  thing  was  done  now,  and  the  question  certainly 
never  would  rise  again. 

The  reason  why  it  couldn't  arise  again  was  what  Portia 
came  to  tell  Rose  this  morning.  She  hoped  she'd  be  able  to 
tell  it  gently — provide  Rose  with  just  the  facts  she'd  have  to 
know,  and  get  away  without  letting  any  other  facts  escape,  so 
that  afterward  she'd  have  the  consolation  of  being  able  to  say 
to  herself,  "That  was  finely  done."  All  her  life,  she  told  her 
self,  she  had  been  doing  fine  things  grudgingly,  mutilating 
them  in  the  doing.  If  she  weren't  very  careful,  that  would 
happen  this  morning.  If  she  could  have  known  the  truth  and 
made  her  resolution,  and  confided  it  to  Rose  during  the  first 
hours  of  her  mother's  illness,  when  the  fight  for  life  had 
drawn  them  together,  it  would  not  have  been  hard.  But  with 
the  beginning  of  convalescence,  when  Rose,  with  an  easy  visit 
and  a  few  facile  caresses,  could  outweigh  in  one  hour,  all  of 
Portia's  unremitting  tireless  service  during  the  other  twenty- 
three,  and  carry  off  as  a  prize  the  whole  of  her  mother's  grati 
tude  and  affection,  the  old  envy  and  irritation  had  come  back 
threefold. 

Rose  greeted  her  with  a  "Hello,  Angel!  Why  didn't  you 
come  right  up  ?  Isn't  it  disgraceful  to  be  lying  around  in  bed 
like  this  in  the  middle  of  the  morning?" 

"I  don't  know/'  said  Portia.  "Might  as  well  stay  in  bed,  if 
you've  nothing  to  do  when  you  get  up."  She  meant  it  to 
sound  good-humored,  but  was  afraid  it  didn't.  "Anyhow,"  she 
added  after  a  straight  look  into  Rose's  face,  "you  look,  this 
morning,  as  if  bed  was  just  where  you  ought  to  be.  What's 
the  matter  with  you,  child  ?" 

"Nothing,"  said  Rose,  " — nothing  that  you'd  call  anything 
at  any  rate." 

Portia  smiled  ironically.  "I'm  still  the  same  old  dragon, 
then,"  she  said.  And  then,  with  a  gesture  of  impatience, 
turned  away.  She  hadn't  meant  to  begin  like  that.  Why 
couldn't  she  keep  her  tongue  in  control ! 

"I  only  meant,"  said  Rose  very  simply,  "that  you'd  say  it 
was  nothing,  if  it  was  the  matter  with  you.  I've  seen  you,  so 


124  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

many  times,  get  up  looking  perfectly  sick  and,  without  any 
breakfast  but  a  cup  of  black  coffee,  put  on  your  old  mackin 
tosh  and  rubbers  and  start  off  for  the  shop,  saying  you  were 
all  right  and  not  to  bother,  that  I  knew  that  was  what  you'd 
say  now,  if  you  felt  the  way  I  do." 

"I'm  sorry,"  said  Portia.  "I  might  have  known  that  was 
what  you  meant.  I  wonder  if  you  ever  want  to  say  ugly 
things  and  don't,  or  if  it's  just  that  it  never  occurs  to  you  to 
try  to  hurt  anybody.  I  didn't  mean  to  say  that  either.  I've 
had  a  rather  worrying  sort  of  week." 

"What  is  it  ?"  said  Rose.  "Tell  me  about  it.  Can  I  help  ?" 

"jSTo,"  said  Portia.  "I've  thought  it  over  and  it  isn't  your 
job."  She  got  up  and  went  to  the  window  where  Rose  couldn't 
see  her  face,  and  stood  looking  out.  "It's  about  mother,"  she 
concluded. 

Rose  sat  up  with  a  jerk.  "About  mother!"  she  echoed. 
"Has  she  been  ill  again  this  week?  And  you  haven't  let  me 
know!  It's  a  shame  I  haven't  been  around,  but  I've  been 
busy" — her  smile  reflected  some  of  the  irony  of  Portia's — 
"and  rather  miserable.  Of  course  I  was  going  this  afternoon." 

"Yes,"  said  Portia,  "I  fancied  you'd  come  this  afternoon. 
That's  why  I  wanted  to  see  you  alone  first." 

"Alone !"  Rose  leaned  sharply  forward.  "Oh,  don't  stand 
there  where  I  can't  see  you !  Tell  me  what  it  is." 

"I'm  going  to,"  said  Portia.  "You  see,  I  wasn't  satisfied 
with  old  Murray.  That  soothing  bedside  manner  of  his,  and 
his  way  of  encouraging  you  as  if  you  were  a  child  going  to 
have  a  tooth  pulled,  drove  me  nearly  wild.  I  thought  it  was 
possible,  either  that  he  didn't  understand  mother's  case,  or 
else  that  he  wouldn't  tell  me  what  he  suspected.  So  a  week 
ago  to-day,  I  got  her  to  go  with  me  to  a  specialist.  He  made 
a  very  thorough  examination,  and  the  next  day  I  went  around 
to  see  him."  Her  voice  got  a  little  harder  and  cooler. 
"Mother5!!  never  be  well,  Rose.  She's  got  an  incurable  dis 
ease.  There's  a  long  name  for  it  that  I  can't  remember. 
What  it  means  is  that  her  heart  is  getting  flabby — degener 
ating,  he  called  it.  He  says  we  can't  do  anything  except  to 


THE   DAMASCUS   EOAD  125 

retard  the  progress  of  the  disease.  It  may  go  fast,  or  it  may 
go  slowly.  That  attack  she  had  was  just  a  symptom,  he  said. 
She'll  have  others.  And  by  and  by,  of  course,  a  fatal  one." 

Still  she  didn't  look  around  from  the  window.  She  knew 
Eose  was  crying.  She  had  heard  the  gasp  and  choke  that  fol 
lowed  her  first  announcement  of  the  news,  and  since  then,  ir 
regularly,  a  muffled  sound  of  sobbing.  She  wanted  to  go  over 
and  comfort  the  young  stricken  thing  there  on  the  bed,  but 
she  couldn't.  She  could  feel  nothing  but  a  dull  irresistible 
anger  that  Eose  should  have  the  easy  relief  of  tears,  which  had 
been  denied  her.  Because  Portia  couldn't  cry. 

"He  said,"  she  went  on,  "that  the  first  thing  to  do  was  to 
get  her  away  from  here.  He  said  that  in  this  climate,  living 
as  she  has  been  doing,  she'd  hardly  last  six  months.  But  he 
said  that  in  a  bland  climate  like  Southern  California,  in  a 
bungalow  without  any  stairs  in  it,  if  she's  carefully  watched 
all  the  time  to  prevent  excitement  or  over-exertion,  she  might 
live  a  good  many  years. 

"So  that's  what  we're  going  to  do.  I've  written  the  Fletch 
ers  to  look  out  a  place  for  us — some  quiet  little  place  that 
won't  cost  too  much,  and  I've  sold  out  my  business.  I  thought 
I'd  get  that  done  before  I  talked  to  you  about  it.  I'll  give  the 
house  here  to  the  agent  to  sell  or  rent,  and  as  soon  as  we  hear 
from  the  Fletchers,  we'll  begin  to  pack.  Within  a  week,  I 
hope." 

Eose  said  a  queer  thing  then.  She  cried  out  incredulously, 
"And  you  and  mother  are  going  away  to  California  to  live ! 
And  leave  me  here  all  alone  !" 

"All  alone  with  the  whole  of  your  own  life,"  thought  Portia, 
but  didn't  say  it. 

"I  can't  realize  it  at  all,"  Eose  went  on  after  a  little  silence. 
"It  doesn't  seem — possible.  Do  you  believe  the  specialist  is 
right?  They're  always  making  mistakes,  aren't  they — con 
demning  people  like  that,  when  the  trouble  isn't  what  they 
say?  Can't  we  go  to  some  one  else  and  make  sure?" 

"What's  the  use?"  said  Portia.  "Suppose  we  did  find  a 
man  who  said  it  probably  wasn't  so  serious  as  that,  and  that 


126  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

she  could  probably  live  all  right  here?  We  shouldn't  know 
that  he  was  right — wouldn't  dare  trust  to  that.  Besides,  if  I 
drag  mother  around  to  any  more  of  them,  she'll  know." 

Eose  looked  up  sharply.    "Doesn't  she  know?" 

"~No"  said  Portia  in  that  hard  even  voice  of  hers.  "I  lied 
to  her  of  course.  I  told  her  the  doctor  said  her  condition  was 
very  serious,  and  that  the  only  way  to  keep  from  being  a  hope 
less  invalid  would  be  to  do  what  he  said — go  out  to  California 
— take  an  absolute  rest  for  two  or  three  years — no  lectures,  no 
writing,  no  going  about. 

"You  know  mother  well  enough  to  know  what  she'd  do  if 
she  knew  the  truth  about  it.  She'd  say,  'If  I  can  never  be 
well,  what's  the  use  of  prolonging  my  life  a  year,  or  two,  or 
five ;  not  really  living,  just  crawling  around  half  alive  and  soak 
ing  up  somebody  else's  life  at  the  same  time  ?'  She'd  say  she 
didn't  believe  it  was  so  bad  as  that  anyway,  but  that  whether 
it  was  or  not,  she'd  go  straight  along  and  live  as  she's  always 
done,  and  when  she  died,  she'd  be  dead.  Don't  you  know 
how  it's  always  pleased  her  when  old  people  could  die — 'in 
harness,'  as  she  says  ?" 

Her  voice  softened  a  little  as  she  concluded  and  the  tense 
ness  of  her  attitude,  there  at  the  window,  relaxed.  The  ordeal, 
or  the  worst  of  it,  was  over;  what  she  had  meant  to  say  was 
said,  and  what  she  had  meant  not  to  say,  if  hinted  at  once  or 
twice,  had  not  caught  Eose's  ear.  She  turned  for  the  first 
time  to  look  at  her.  Eose  was  drooping  forlornly  forward,  one 
arm  clasped  around  her  knees,  and  she  was  trying  to  dry  her 
tears  on  the  sleeve  of  her  nightgown.  The  childlike  pathos  of 
the  attitude  caught  Portia  like  the  surge  of  a  wave.  She 
crossed  the  room  and  sat  down  on  the  edge  of  the  bed.  She'd 
have  come  still  closer  and  taken  the  girl  in  her  arms  but  for 
the  fear  of  starting  her  crying  again. 

"Yes,"  Eose  said.  "That's  mother.  And  I  guess  she's  right 
about  it.  It  must  be  horrible  to  be  half  alive; — to  know 
you're  no  use  and  never  will  be.  Only  I  don't  believe  it  will 
be  that  way  with  her.  I  believe  you  told  her  the  truth  without 
knowing  it.  It's  just  a  feeling,  but  I'm  sure  of  it.  She'll  get 
strong  and  well  again  out  there.  You'll  think  so,  too,  when  you 


THE    DAMASCUS   EOAD  127 

get  rested  up  a  little. — You're  so  frightfully  tired,  poor  dear. 
It  makes  me  sick  to  think  what  a  week  you've  had.  And  that 
you've  gone  through  it  all  alone; — without  ever  giving  Rod 
ney  and  me  a  chance  to  help.  I  don't  see  why  you  did  that, 
Portia." 

"Oh,  I  saw  it  was  my  job"  Portia  said,  in  that  cool  dry  way 
of  hers.  "It  couldn't  work  out  any  other  way.  It  had  to  be 
done  and  there  was  no  one  else  to  do  it.  So  what  was  the 
use  of  making  a  fuss?  It  was  easier,  really,  without,  and — 
I  didn't  want  any  extra  difficulties." 

"But  all  the  work  there  must  have  been!"  Rose  protested. 
"Selling  your  shop,  and  all.  How  did  you  ever  manage  to 
do  it?" 

"That  was  luck,  of  course,"  Portia  admitted.  "Do  you 
know  that  Craig  woman?  You  may  have  met  her.  She's 
rather  on  the  fringe  of  your  set,  I  believe.  She's  got  a  good 
deal  of  money  and  nothing  to  do,  and  I  think  she's  got  a  fool 
notion  that  it'll  be  cliic  to  go  'into  trade.'  She  came  and 
offered  to  buy  me  out  a  month  ago,  and  of  course  I  wouldn't 
listen.  But  just  by  luck  she  called  me  up  again  the  very  day 
I  went  to  talk  to  the  specialist.  I  asked  for  twenty-four  hours 
to  think  it  over,  and  by  that  time  I'd  made  up  my  mind.  I 
got  a  very  good  price  from  her,  really.  She  bought  the  whole 
thing;  lease,  stock  and  good-will." 

It  wasn't  more  than  a  very  subconscious  impression  in  the 
back  of  Rose's  mind,  that  Portia  must  be  pretty  callous  and 
cold  to  have  been  able  on  the  very  day  of  the  doctor's  sentence 
to  look  as  far  ahead  as  that,  and  to  drive  a  good  bargain  on 
the  next — awfully  efficient,  anyway.  "I  wish  I  was  more  like 
you,"  she  said. 

But  she  didn't  want  to  be  questioned  as  to  just  what  she 
mieant  by  it  and,  aware  that  Portia  had  just  shot  a  queer 
searching  look  at  her,  she  changed  the  subject,  or  thought 
she  did. 

"Anyway,  I'm  glad  it  worked  out  so  well  for  you/'  she  went 
on;  "selling  the  shop  so  easily,  and  all.  And  I  believe  it'll 
do  you  as  much  good  as  mother.  Getting  a  rest.  .  .  .  You 
do  need  it.  You're  worked  risrht  down  to  the  bones.  And  out 


128  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

there  where  it's  warm  and  bright  all  the  time,  and  you  don't 
have  to  get  up  in  the  dark  any  more  winter  mornings  and  wade 
off  through  the  slush  to  the  street-car.  .  .  .  And  a  nice  lit 
tle  bungalow  to  live  in — just  you  and  mother.  .  .  .  I — I 
sort  of  wish  I  was  going  too." 

Portia  laughed — a  ragged,  unnatural  sounding  laugh  that 
brought  a  look  of  puzzled  inquiry  from  Rose. 

"Why,  nothing,"  Portia  explained.  "It  was  just  the  notion 
of  your  leaving  Rodney  and  all  you've  got  here — all  the  won 
derful  things  you  have  to  do — for  what  we'll  have  out  there. 
The  idea  of  your  envying  me  is  something  worth  a  small 
laugh,  don't  you  think  ?" 

Rose's  head  drooped  lower.  She  buried  her  face  in  her 
hands.  "I  do  envy  you,"  she  said.  There  was  a  dull  muffled 
passion  in  her  voice.  "Why  shouldn't  I  envy  }'ou?  You're 
so  cold  and  certain  all  the  time.  You  make  up  your  mind 
what  you'll  do,  and  you  do  it.  I  try  to  do  things  and  just 
make  myself  ridiculous.  Oh,  I  know  I've  got  a  motor  and  a 
lot  of  French  dresses,  and  a  maid,  and  I  don't  have  to  get  up 
in  the  morning,  because,  as  you  say,  I  have  nothing  else  to  do 
— and  I  suppose  that  might  make  some  people  happy." 

"You've  got  a  husband,"  said  Portia  in  a  thin  brittle  voice. 
"That  might  count  for  something,  I  should  think." 

"Yes,  and  what  good  am  I  to  him  ?"  Rose  demanded.  "He 
can't  talk  to  me — not  about  his  work  or  anything  like  that. 
And  I  can't  help  him  any  way.  I'm  something  nice  for  him  to 
make  love  to,  when  he  feels  like  doing  it,  and  I'm  a  nuisance 
when  I  make  scenes  and  get  tragic.  And  that's  all.  That's 
— marriage,  I  guess.  You're  the  lucky  one,  Portia." 

The  silence  had  lasted  a  good  while  before  Rose  noticed 
that  there  was  any  special  quality  about  it — became  aware 
that  since  the  end  of  her  outburst — of  which  she  was  ashamed 
even  while  she  yielded  to  it,  because  it  represented  not  what 
she  meant,  but  what,  at  the  moment,  she  felt — Portia  had  not 
stirred ;  had  sat  there  as  rigidly  still  as  a  figure  carved  in  ivory. 

Becoming  aware  of  that,  she  raised  her  head.  Portia  wasn't 
looking  at  her,  but  down  at  her  own  clenched  hands. 

"It  needed  just  that,  I  suppose,"  she  heard  her  older  sister 
say  between  almost  motionless  lips.  "I  thought  it  was  pretty 


THE    DAMASCUS   EOAD  129 

complete  before,  but  it  took  that  to  make  it  perfect — that 
you  think  I'm  the  lucky  one — lucky  never  to  have  had  a  hus 
band,  or  any  one  else  for  that  matter,  to  love  me.  And  lucky 
now,  to  have  to  give  up  the  only  substitute  I  had  for  that." 

"Portia!"  Eose  cried  out,  for  the  mordant  alkaline  bitter 
ness  in  her  sister's  voice  and  the  tragic  irony  in  her  face,  were 
almost  terrifying.  But  the  outcry  might  never  have  been 
uttered  for  any  effect  it  had. 

"I  hoped  this  wouldn't  happen,"  the  words  came  steadily  on, 
one  at  a  time.  "I  hoped  I  could  get  this  over  and  get  away 
out  of  your  life  altogether  without  letting  it  happen.  But  I 
can't.  Perhaps  it's  just  as  well — perhaps  it  may  do  you  some 
good.  But  that's  not  why  I'm  doing  it.  I'm  doing  it  for 
myself.  Just  for  once,  I'm  going  to  let  go !  You  won't  like 
it.  You're  going  to  get  hurt." 

Rose  drew  herself  erect  and  a  curious  change  went  over  her 
face,  so  that  you  wouldn't  have  known  she'd  been  crying.  She 
drew  in  a  long  breath  and  said,  very  steadily,  "Tell  me.  I 
shan't  try  to  get  away." 

"A  man  came  to  our  house  one  day  to  collect  a  bill,"  Portia 
went  on,  quite  as  if  Eose  hadn't  spoken.  "Mother  was  out, 
and  I  was  at  home.  I  was  seventeen  then,  getting  ready  to  go 
to  Vassar.  Fred  was  a  sophomore  at  Ann  Arbor,  and  Harvey 
was  going  to  graduate  in  June.  You  were  only  seven — I  sup 
pose  you  were  at  school.  Anyhow,  I  was  at  home,  and  I  let 
him  in,  and  he  made  a  fuss.  Said  he'd  have  us  black-listed 
by  other  grocers,  if  it  wasn't  paid. 

"It  was  the  first  I  ever  knew  about  anything  like  that.  I 
knew  we  weren't  rich,  of  course — I  never  had  quite  enough 
pocket  money.  But  the  idea  of  an  old  unpaid  grocery  bill 
made  me  sick.  I  talked  things  over  with  mother  the  next  day 
— told  her  I  wasn't  going  to  college — said  I  was  going  to  get  a 
job.  I  got  her  to  tell  me  how  things  stood,  and  she  did,  as 
well  as  she  could.  The  boys  were  getting  their  college  educa 
tion  out  of  the  capital  of  father's  estate,  so  that  the  income 
of  it  was  getting  smaller.  She  had  meant  that  I  should  do  the 
same.  But  the  income  wasn't  really  big  enough  to  live  on  as 
it  was. 

"Mother  could  earn  money  of  course,  lecturing  and  writing, 


130  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

but  money  wasn't  one  of  the  things  she  naturally  thought 
about,  and  when  there  was  something  big  and  worth  while 
to  do,  she  plunged  in  and  did  it  whether  it  was  going  to  pay 
her  anything  or  not.  And  there  were  you  coming  along,  and 
mother  wasn't  so  very  strong  even  then,  and  I — well,  I  saw 
where  I  came  in. 

"I  got  mother  to  let  me  run  all  the  accounts  after  that,  and 
attend  to  everything.  And  I  got  a  job  and  began  paying 
my  way  within  a  week." 

"If  I  had  a  thing  like  that  to  remember/'  said  Rose  un 
steadily,  "I'd  never  forget  to  be  proud  of  it  so  long  as  I 
lived !" 

"I  wish  I  could  be  proud  of  it,"  said  Portia.  "But,  like 
everything  else  I  do,  I  spoiled  it.  I  knew  that  mother  was 
doing  a  big  fine  work  worth  doing — worth  my  making  a  sac 
rifice  for,  and  I  wanted  to  make  the  sacrifice.  But  I  couldn't 
help  making  a  sort  of  grievance  of  it,  too.  In  all  these  years 
I've  always  made  mother  afraid  of  me — always,  made  her  feel 
that  I  was,  somehow,  contemptuous  of  her  work  and  ideas. 
That's  rather  a  strong  way  of  putting  it,  perhaps.  But  I've 
seen  her  trying  to  hide  her  enthusiasms  from  me  a  little,  be 
cause  of  my  nasty  way  of  sticking  pins  in  them. 

"Oh,  of  course  in  a  way  I  was  making  the  enthusiasms  pos 
sible — I  knew  that.  She  never  could  have  gone  on  as  she  did 
if  she'd  been  nagged  at  all  the  time  for  money.  Big  ideas 
are  always  more  important  to  her  than  small  facts,  but  with 
out  some  narrow-minded,  literal  person  to  look  after  the  facts 
her  ideas  wouldn't  have  had  much  chance.  I  grubbed  away 
until  I  got  things  straightened  out,  so  that  her  income  was 
enough  to  live  on — enough  for  her  to  live  on.  I'd  pulled  her 
through.  But  then  .  .  ." 

"But  then  there  was  me,"  said  Rose. 

"I  thought  I  was  going  to  let  you  go,"  Portia  went  on  in 
flexibly.  "You'd  got  to  be  just  the  age  I  was  when  I  went  to 
work,  and  I  said  there  was  no  reason  why  you  shouldn't  come 
in  for  your  share.  If  things  had  happened  a  little  differently, 
I'd  have  told  mother  how  matters  stood  and  you'd  have  got 
a  job  somewhere  and  gone  to  work.  But  things  didn't  come 


THE   DAMASCUS   ROAD  131 

out  that  way — at  least  I  couldn't  make  up  my  mind  to  make 
them — so  you  went  to  the  university.  I  paid  for  that,  and  I 
paid  for  your  trousseau,  and  then  I  was  through." 

Eose  was  trembling,  but  she  didn't  flinch.  "Wh — what  was 
it,"  she  asked  quietly,  "what  was  it  that  might  have  been  dif 
ferent  and  wasn't?  Was  it — was  it  somebody  you  wanted  to 
marry — that  you  gave  up  so  I  could  have  my  chance  ?" 

Portia's  hard  little  laugh  cut  like  a  knife.  "I  ought  to  be 
lieve  that,"  she  said.  "I've  told  myself  so  enough  times.  But 
it's  not  true.  I  wonder  why  you  should  have  thought  of  that — • 
why  it  occurred  to  you  that  a  cold-blooded  fish  like  me  should 
want  to  marry?" 

Eose  didn't  try  to  answer.     She  waited. 

"You  have  always  thought  me  cold,"  Portia  said.  "So  has 
mother.  I'm  not,  really.  I'm — the  other  way.  I  don't  be 
lieve  there  ever  was  a  girl  that  wanted  love  and  marriage  more 
than  I.  But  I  didn't  attract  anybody.  I  was  working  pretty 
hard,  of  course,  and  that  left  me  too  tired  to  go  out  and  play 
—left  me  a  little  cross  and  acid  most  of  the  time.  But  I 
don't  believe  that  was  the  whole  reason.  It  wouldn't  have 
worked  out  that  way  with  you.  But  nobody  ever  saw  me  at 
all.  The  men  I  was  introduced  to  forgot  me — were  polite  to 
me — got  away  as  soon  as  they  could.  They  were  always 
craning  around  for  a  look  at  somebody  else.  The  few  men — 
the  two  or  three  who  weren't  like  that,  weren't  good  enough. 
But  a  man  did  want  me  to  marry  him  at  last,  and  for  a  while 
I  thought  I  would.  Just — just  for  the  sake  of  marrying 
somebody.  He  wasn't  much,  but  he  was  some  one.  But  I 
knew  I'd  come  to  hate  him  for  not  being  some  one  else  and  I 
couldn't  make  up  my  mind  to  it.  So  I  took  you  on  instead. 

"I  stopped  hoping,  you  see,  and  tried  to  forget  all  about  it 
—tried  to  crowd  it  out  of  my  life.  I  said  I'd  make  my  work 
a  substitute  for  it.  And,  in  a  way,  I  succeeded.  The  work 
opened  up  and  got  more  interesting  as  it  got  bigger.  It 
wasn't  just  selling  four-dollar  candlesticks  and  crickets  and 
blue  glass  flower-holders.  I  was  beginning  to  get  real  jobs 
to  do — big  jobs  for  big  people,  and  it  was  exciting.  That 
made  it  easier  to  forget.  I  was  beginning  to  think  that  some 


132  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

day  I'd  earn  my  way  into  the  open  big  sort  of  life  that  your 
new  friends  have  had  for  nothing. 

"And  then,  a  week  ago,  there  came  the  doctor  and  cut  off 
that  chance.  Oh,  there's  no  way  out,  I  know  that!  That's 
the  way  the  pattern  was  cut,  I  suppose,  in  the  beginning.  I've 
always  suspected  the  cosmic  Dressmaker  of  having  a  sense  of 
humor.  Now  I  know  it.  I'm  the  lucky  one  who  isn't  going 
to  have  to  wade  through  the  slush  any  more.  I'm  to  go  out 
to  southern  California  and  live  in  a  nice  little  bungalow  and 
be  a  nurse  for  five  or  ten  years,  and  then  I'm  going  to  be  left 
alone  in  genteel  poverty,  without  an  interest  in  the  world,  and 
too  tired  to  make  any.  And  I'll  probably  live  to  eighty. 

"And  yet," — she  leaned  suddenly  forward,  and  the  passion 
that  had  been  suppressed  in  her  voice  till  now,  leaped  up  into 
flame — "and  yet,  can  you  tell  me  what  I  could  have  done  dif 
ferently?  I've  lived  the  kind  of  life  they  preach  about — 
a  life  of  noble  sacrifice.  It  hasn't  ennobled  me.  It's  made  me 
petty — mean — sour.  It's  withered  me  up.  Look  at  the  dif 
ference  between  us!  Look  at  you  with  your  big  free  spa 
ciousness — your  power  of  loving  and  attracting  love!  Why, 
you  even  love  me,  now,  in  spite  of  all  I've  said  this  morning. 
I've  envied  you  that — I've  almost  hated  you  for  it. 

"No,  that's  a  lie.  I've  wanted  to.  The  only  thing  I  could 
ever  hate  you  for,  would  be  for  failing.  You've  got  to  make 
good !  You've  had  my  share  as  well  as  yours — you're  living 
my  life  as  well  as  yours.  I'm  the  branch  they  cut  off  so  that 
you  could  grow.  If  you  give  up  and  let  the  big  thing  slip 
out  of  your  hands  the  way  you  were  talking  this  morning, 
because  you're  too  weak  to  hold  it  and  haven't  pluck  enough 
to  fight  for  it  .  .  ." 

"Look  at  me !"  said  Rose.  The  words  rang  like  a  command 
on  a  battle-field. 

Portia  looked.  Eose's  blue  eyes  were  blazing.  "I  won't  do 
that,"  she  said  very  quietly.  "I  promise  you  that."  Then 
the  hard  determination  in  her  face  changed  to  something 
softer,  and  as  if  Portia's  resistance  counted  no  more  than  that 
of  a  child,  she  pulled  her  sister  up  in  her  arms  and  held  her 
tight.  And  so  at  last  Portia  got  the  relief  of  tears. 


CHAPTER  VII 

HOW   THE   PATTERN   WAS   CUT 

THROUGH  the  two  -weeks  that  intervened  before  Portia  and 
her  mother  left  for  the  West,  Rose  disregarded  the  physical 
wretchedness — which  went  on  getting  worse  instead  of  better 
— and  dismissed  her  psychical  worries  until  she  should  have 
time  to  attend  to  them.  She  helped  Portia  pack,  she  pre 
sented  a  steady  cheerful  radiance  of  optimism  to  her  mother, 
that  never  faltered  until  the  last  farewells  were  said. 

Just  how  she'd  take  up  the  fight  again  for  the  great  thing 
Portia  had  adjured  her  not  to  miss,  she  didn't  know.  She 
supposed  she'd  go  back  to  her  law-books — at  any  rate  until 
she  could  work  out  something  better. 

But  the  pattern,  it  seemed,  was  cut  differently.  She  went 
10  the  doctor's  office  the  day  after  Portia  took  her  mother 
away,  and  discovered  the  cause  of  her  physical  wretchedness. 
She  was  pregnant. 


133 


CHAPTER  VIII 

A   BIETHDAY 

EODNEY  heard  young  Craig,  who  deviled  up  law  for  him, 
saying  good  night  to  the  stenographer;  glanced  at  his  watch 
and  opened  the  door  to  his  outer  office. 

"You  may  go  home,  Miss  Beach/'  he  said.  "I'm  staying 
on  for  a  while  but  I  shan't  want  you."  Then,  to  the  office 
boy:  "You,  too,  Albert." 

He  waited  till  he  heard  them  go,  then  went  out  and  discon 
nected  his  own  desk  telephone,  which  the  office  boy,  on  going 
home,  always  left  plugged  through ;  went  back  into  his  inner 
office  again  and  shut  the  door  after  him. 

There  was  more  than  enough  pressing  work  on  his  desk  to 
fill  the  clear  hour  that  remained  to  him  before  he  had  to  start 
for  home.  But  he  didn't  mean  to  do  it.  He  didn't  mean  to  do 
anything  except  drink  down  thirstily  the  sixty  minutes  of 
pure  solitude  that  were  before  him ;  to  let  his  mind  run  free 
from  the  clutch  of  circumstance.  That  hour  had  become  a 
habit  with  him  lately,  like — he  smiled  at  the  comparison — like 
taking  a  drug.  When  something  happened  that  forced  him  to 
forego  it,  he  felt  cheated — irrationally  irritable.  He  was 
furtive  about  it,  too.  He  never  corrected  Eose's  assumption 
that  the  thing  which  kept  him  late  at  the  office  so  much  of 
the  time  nowadays  was  a  press  of  work.  He  even  concealed  the 
fact  that  he  pulled  his  telephone  plug,  by  sticking  it  back 
again  every  night  just  before  he  left. 

He  tried  to  laugh  that  guilty  feeling  out  of  existence.  But 
he  couldn't.  He  knew  too  well  whence  it  sprang.  He  knew 
whom  he  was  stealing  that  hour  from.  It  wasn't  the  world  in 
general  he  intrenched  himself  against.  It  was  his  wife.  The 
real  purpose  of  that  sixty  minutes  was  to  enable  him  to  stop 
thinking  and  feeling  about  her. 

134 


A   BIETHDAY  135 

It  was  not  that  she  had  faded  for  him — become  less  the 
poignant,  vivid,  irresistible  thing  he  had  first  fallen  in  love 
with.  Rather  the  contrary.  The  simple  rapture  of  desire  that 
had  characterized  the  period  of  their  engagement  and  the 
first  months  of  their  marriage,  had  lost  something — not  so 
much,  either — of  its  tension.  But  it  had  broadened — deep 
ened  into  something  more  compelling,  more  pervasive — more, 
in  his  present  mood,  formidable. 

She  hadn't  seemed  quite  well,  lately,  nor  altogether  happy, 
and  he  had  not  been  able  to  find  out  why.  He  had  attributed 
it  at  first  to  the  shock  occasioned  by  her  mother's  illness  and 
her  departure  with  Portia  to  California,  but  this  explanation 
seemed  not  to  cover  the  ground.  Why  couldn't  she  have 
talked  freely  with  him  about  that?  Inquiries  about  her 
health,  attempts — clumsily  executed,  no  doubt — to  treat  her 
with  special  tenderness  and  guard  her  against  overexertion, 
only  irritated  her,  drove  her  to  the  very  edge  of  her  self-con 
trol — or  over  it.  She  was  all  right,  she  always  said.  He 
couldn't  force  confidences  from  her  of  course.  But  her  pale 
face  and  eyes  wide  with  a  trouble  in  them  he  could  not  fathom 
stirred  something  deeper  in  him  than  the  former  glow  and 
glory  had  ever  reached. 

And  there  was  a  new  thing  that  gripped  him  in  a  positively 
terrifying  way — a  realization  of  his  importance  to  her.  The 
after-effect  of  her  invasion  of  his  office  the  night  of  the  Ran 
dolphs'  dinner  and  of  his  learning  of  the  tremulous  interest 
with  which  she  had  afterward  followed  the  case  he  was  then 
working  on,  had  been  very  different  from  his  first  irritation 
and  his  first  amusement. 

He  had  discovered,  too,  one  day — a  fortnight  or  so  ago,  in 
the  course  of  a  rummage  after  some  article  he  had  mislaid, 
a  heap  of  law-books  that  weren't  his.  He  had  guessed  the 
explanation  of  them,  but  had  said  nothing  to  Rose  about  it — 
had  found  it  curiously  impossible  to  say  anything.  If  only 
she  had  taken  up  something  of  her  own!  It  seemed  as  es 
sentially  a  law  of  her  being  to  attempt  to  absorb  herself  in 
him,  as  it  was  a  law  of  his  to  resist  that  absorption  of  himself 
in  her. 


136  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

But  resistance  was  difficult.  The  tendency  was,  after  his 
perfectly  solid,  recognizable  duties  had  been  given  their  places 
in  the  cubic  content  of  his  day,  that  Eose  should  fill  up  the 
rest.  It  was  as  if  you  had  a  bucket  half  full  of  irregularly 
shaped  stones  and  filled  it  up  with  water.  And  yet  there 
was  a  man  in  him  who  was  neither  the  hard-working,  success 
ful  advocate,  nor  Eose's  husband — a  man  whose  existence  Eose 
didn't  seem  to  suspect.  (Was  there  then  in  her  no  woman  that 
corresponded  to  him?)  That  man  had  to  fight  now  for  a 
chance  to  breathe. 

He  got  a  pipe  out  of  a  drawer  in  his  desk,  loaded  and  lighted 
it,  stretched  his  arms,  and  sat  down  in  his  desk  chair.  In  the 
middle  of  his  blotter  was  a  stack  of  papers  his  stenographer 
had  laid  there  just  before  she  went  out.  On  top  of  the  heap 
was  a  memorandum  in  her  handwriting,  and  mechanically  he 
read  it. 

"Please  ask  Mrs.  Aldrich  about  this  bill,"  it  read.  "The 
work  done  seems  to  be  the  same  that  was  paid  for  last  month." 

The  rest  of  the  month's  bills  lay  beneath,  all  neatly  scheduled 
and  totaled ;  and  the  total  came  to  more  than  three  thousand 
dollars.  He  damned  them  cordially  and  moved  them  over  to 
one  side. 

But  the  mood  of  quiet  contentment  he  had,  for  just  a  mo 
ment,  captured,  had  given  place  to  angry  exasperation.  He 
felt  like  a  bull  out  in  a  ring  tormented  by  the  glare  and  the 
clamor  and  the  flutter  of  little  red  flags. 

There  was  nothing  ruinous  about  his  way  of  living.  In 
cluding  his  inherited  income  with  what  he  could  earn,  work 
ing  the  way  he  had  been  working  lately,  he  could  meet  an  ex 
penditure  of  thirty-six  thousand  dollars  a  year  well  enough. 
It  meant  thinking  about  his  fees  of  course,  seeing  to  it  that 
the  work  he  undertook  was  profitable  as  well  as  interesting. 
Only,  declared  the  man  who  was  not  Eose's  husband,  it  was 
senseless — suffocating !  Eodney  tried,  with  an  athletic  sweep 
of  his  will,  to  crowd  that  train  of  thought  out  of  his  mind  as, 
with  his  hand,  he  had  swept  the  papers  that  gave  rise  to  it. 

He  leaned  his  elbows  on  the  cleared  blotter  and  propped  up 


A   BIRTHDAY  137 

his  chin  on  his  fists.  The  thing  exactly  in  front  of  his  eyes 
was  his  desk  calendar.  There  was  something  familiar  about 
the  date — some  subconscious  association  that  couldn't  quite 
rise  to  the  surface.  Was  there  something  he  had  to  do  to-day, 
that  he'd  forgotten?  No,  Miss  Beach  would  have  reminded 
him  of  anything  except  a  social  engagement.  And  he  dis 
tinctly  remembered  that  Bose  had  said  this  morning  that  the 
evening  was  clear.  And  yet,  surely  .  .  .  Then,  with  a  grunt 
of  relief  and  amusement,  he  got  it.  It  was  his  birthday! 
Another  mile-stone. 

Where  had  he  been,  what  had  he  been  doing  a  year  ago 
to-day?  It  would  be  interesting  if  he  could  manage  to  re 
member. 

A  year  ago — why,  good  lord !  That  was  the  day  it  had  all 
begun.  He'd  sold  the  old  house  that  day  and  then  had  started 
to  walk  over  to  Frederica's  for  dinner,  and  got  caught  in  the 
rain  and  taken  a  street-car.  He  had  heard  a  vibrant  young 
voice  say,  "Don't  dare  touch  me  like  that,"  and,  turning,  had 
seen  the  blazing  glorious  creature  who  held  the  conductor 
pinned  by  both  wrists.  That  had  been  Eose — his  Eose ;  whom 
he  was  spending  these  sixty  minutes  out  of  the  twenty-four 
hours  trying  to  forget  about ! 

And  that  was  only  a  year  ago.  It  was  curiously  hard  to 
realize.  Their  identities  had  shifted  so  strangely — his  own  as 
well  as  hers.  Well,  and  in  what  direction  had  he  changed? 
How  did  he  compare — the  man  who  sat  here  now,  with  the 
man  who  had  unhesitatingly  jumped  off  the  car  to  follow  a 
new  adventure — the  man  who  had  turned  up  water-logged  at 
Frederica's  dinner  and  made  hay  of  her  plan  to  marry  him  on* 
to  Hermione  Woodruff? 

They  had  had  a  great  old  talk  that  night,  Frederica  and 
he,  he  remembered.  He  remembered  what  he  had  talked 
about,  and  he  smiled  grimly  over  the  recollection — space  and 
leisure ;  the  defective  intelligence  that  trapped  men  into  clut 
tering  their  lives  with  useless  junk;  so  many  things  to  have 
and  to  do  that  they  couldn't  turn  around  without  breaking 
something.  Had  he  been  a  fool  then,  or  was  he  a  fool  now  ? 


138  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

Both,  perhaps.  But  how  old  Frederiea  must  have  grinned 
over  the  naivete  of  him.  Which  of  the  two  of  him  in  her 
candid  opinion  would  be  the  better  man? 

He  believed  he  could  answer  that  question.  Oh,  he  was 
succeeding  all  right — increasing  his  practise,  making  money, 
getting  cautious — prudent ;  he  didn't  bolt  the  track  any  more. 
And  the  quality  of  his  work  was  good,  he  couldn't  quarrel 
with  that.  Only,  the  old  big  free  dreams  that  had  glorified 
it,  were  gone.  He  was  in  harness,  drawing  a  cart ;  following 
a  bundle  of  hay. 

He  sprang  impatiently  to  his  feet,  thrust  back  his  chair 
so  violently  as  he  did  so  that  it  tipped  over  with  a  crash. 
The  one  really  footling,  futile,  fool  thing  to  do,  was  what  he 
was  doing  now — lamenting  his  old  way  of  life  and  making 
no  effort  to  recapture  it !  Let  him  either  accept  the  situation, 
make  up  his  mind  to  it  and  stop  complaining,  or  else  offer  it 
some  effective  resistance — sweep  the  flummery  out  of  his  life 
— clear  decks  for  action. 

Well,  and  that  was  the  most  asinine  consideration  of  all. 
Because  of  course  he  couldn't  do  one  thing  or  the  other.  As 
long  as  the  man  who  wasn't  Eose's  husband  remained  alive 
in  him,  he'd  protest — struggle — clamor  for  his  old  freedom. 
And  yet,  as  long  as  the  million  tiny  cords  that  bound  him, 
Gulliver-like,  went  back  to  Eose,  talk  of  breaking  them  was 
sophomoric  foolishness.  He'd  better  go  home ! 

The  building  was  pretty  well  deserted  by  now,  and  against 
the  silence  he  heard  the  buzzer  in  his  telephone  switchboard 
proclaiming  insistently  that  some  one  was  trying  to  get  him 
on  the  telephone.  His  hour  of  recollection  hadn't  been  a  suc 
cess,  but  the  invasion  of  it  irritated  him  none  the  less.  He 
thought  at  first  he  wouldn't  answer.  He  didn't  care  who  was 
on  the  wire.  He  didn't  want  to  talk  to  anybody.  But  no  one 
can  resist  the  mechanical  bell-ringers  they  use  in  exchanges 
nowadays — the  even-spaced  ring  and  wait,  ring  and  wait,  so 
manifestly  incapable  of  discouragement.  At  the  end  of  forty- 
five  seconds,  he  snatched  open  his  door,  punched  the  jack 
into  its  socket,  caught  up  the  head-piece,  and  bellowed, 
"Hello!"  into  the  dangling  transmitter. 


'A   BIRTHDAY  139 

And  then  the  look  of  annoyance  in  his  face  changed  to  one 
of  incredulous  pleasure.  "Good  God !"  he  said.  "Is  that  you, 
Barry  Lake?  Are  you  here  in  Chicago?  And  Jane,  too? 
.  .  .  How  long  you  going  to  be  here  ?  .  .  .  Lord,  but 
that's  immense !" 

And  five  minutes  later  he  was  calling  Rose  on  the  wire. 
"Rose,  listen  to  this !  Barry  Lake  and  his  wife  are  here.  He 
just  called  up.  They  got  in  from  Xew  York  at  five  o'clock, 
and  I've  asked  them  out  to  dinner.  Barry  Lake  and  Jane ! 
What's  the  matter?  Can't  you  hear  me?  .  .  .  Why, 
they're  about  the  best  friends  I've  got.  The  magazine  writer, 
you  know,  and  his  wife.  And  they're  coming  out  to  dinner 
—coming  right  out.  I  told  them  not  to  dress.  I'll  come 
straight  home  myself — get  there  before  they  do,  I  guess. 
.  .  .  Why,  Rose,  what's  the  matter?  Aren't  you  well? 
Look  here !  If  you're  below  par,  and  don't  feel  like  having 
them  come,  I  can  call  it  off  and  go  over  to  the  hotel  and  dine 
with  them.  .  .  .  You'd  rather  we  came  out  to  the  house  ? 
You're  sure?  Because  they  won't  mind  a  bit.  I  can  take 
them  to  a  restaurant  or  anywhere.  .  .  .  All  right,  if  you're 
sure  it  won't  be  too  much  for  you.  I'll  be  home  in  fifteen 
minutes.  Lord,  but  it  Avas  good  to  hear  old  Barry's  voice 
again !  I  haven't  seen  him  for  over  a  year.  You're  sure  you'd 
rather?  ...  All  right.  Good-by." 

But  he  sat  there  frowning  in  a  puzzled  sort  of  way  for  half 
a  minute  after  he'd  pulled  the  plug.  Rose's  voice  had  cer 
tainly  sounded  queer.  He  was  sure  she  hadn't  planned  any 
thing  else  for  to-night.  He  distinctly  remembered  her  say 
ing  just  before  he  left  for  the  office  that  they'd  have  the 
evening  to  themselves.  And  it  was  incredible  that  she  minded 
his  bringing  home  two  old  friends  like  the  Lakes  on  the  spur 
of  the  moment,  to  take  pot-luck.  Oh,  well,  you  couldn't  tell 
about  people's  voices  over  the  telephone.  There  must  have  been 
something  funny  about  the  connection. 

An  opportune  taxi  just  passing  the  entrance  to  his  office 
building  as  he  came  out,  enabled  him  to  better  the  fifteen 
minutes  he'd  allowed  for  getting  home.  But  in  spite  of  this  he 
found  Rose  rather  splendidly  gowned  for  her  expected  guests. 


140  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

"Good  gracious !"  lie  cried  excitedly.  "What  did  you  do 
that  for?  I  thought  I  told  you  over  the  phone  the  Lakes 
weren't  going  to  dress." 

"I  was — dressed  like  this  when  you  telephoned,"  Rose  said. 
"And  I  was  afraid  there  wouldn't  be  time  to  change  into  any 
thing  else." 

"Wre  weren't  going  anywhere,  were  we  ?"  he  asked.  "There's 
nothing  I've  forgotten?" 

"No,"  she  said,  "we  weren't  going  anywhere." 

"And  you  dressed  like  that  just  for  a — treat  for  me !" 

She  nodded.  "Just  for  you,"  she  said.  "Roddy,  who  are 
the  Lakes  ?  Oh,  I  know  his  articles,  I  think !  But  where  were 
they  friends  of  yours,  and  when?" 

"Why,  for  years,  until  they  moved  to  New  York.  They 
used  to  live  here.  I  know  I  must  have  told  you  about  them. 
I  was  always  having  dinner  with  them — either  out  in  Rogers 
Park,  where  they  lived,  or  at  queer,  terrible  little  restaurants 
down-town.  They  were  always  game  to  try  anything,  once. 
He's  the  longest,  leanest,  angularest,  absent-mindedest  chap 
in  the  world.  And  just  about  the  best.  And  his  wife  fits  all 
his  angles.  She's  a  good  chap,  too.  That's  the  way  you  have 
to  think  of  her.  They're  a  great  pair.  She  writes,  too.  Oh, 
you're  sure  to  like  them !  They're  going  to  be  out  here  for 
months,  he  says.  He's  going  to  specialize  in  women,  and  he's 
come  back  here  where  they've  got  the  vote  and  all,  to  make 
headquarters.  Lord,  but  it's  great !  I  haven't  had  a  real  talk 
with  anybody  since  he  went  away,  over  a  year  ago !" 

Then,  at  the  sound  of  the  bell,  he  cried  out,  "There  they 
are !"  and  dashed  down  into  the  hall  ahead  of  the  parlor 
maid,  as  eagerly  as  a  schoolboy  anticipating  a  birthday  pres 
ent. 

Rose  followed  more  slowly,  and  by  the  time  she  had  reached 
the  landing  she  found  him  slapping  Barry  on  the  back  and 
shaking  both  hands  with  Jane,  and  trying  to  help  both  of 
them  out  of  their  wraps  at  once. 

The  last  thing  she  could  have  thought  of  just  then,  was  of 
making,  for  herself,  an  effective  entrance  on  the  scene.  But 
it  worked  out  rather  that  way.  The  three  of  them,  Rodney 


Barry  and  Jane  gazed  at  her  wide-eyed. 


A    BIRTHDAY  141 

and  the  Lakes,  at  the  foot  of  the  stairs,  in  the  clothes  they 
had  been  working  and  traveling  in  all  day,  looked  up  simul 
taneously  and  saw  Eose,  gowned  for  a  treat  for  Rodney,  on 
the  first  landing;  a  wonderful  rose-colored  Boucher  tapestry 
(guaranteed  authentic  by  Bertie  Willis)  on  the  wall  behind  her 
for  a  background,  and  the  carved  Gothic  newel-post  bringing 
out  the  whiteness  of  the  hand  that  rested  upon  it.  The  picture 
would  have  won  a  moment's  silence  from  anybody.  And 
Barry  and  Jane  simply  gazed  at  her  wide-eyed. 

Rodney  was  the  first  to  speak.  "It's  really  the  Lakes,  Rose. 
I  couldn't  quite  believe  it  till  I  saw  them.  And  the  lady  on 
the  landing,"  he  went  on,  turning  to  his  guests,  "is  really  my 
wife.  It's  all  a  little  incredible,  isn't  it  ?" 

When  the  greetings  were  over  and  they  were  on  the  way 
up-stairs  again,  he  said:  "I  told  Rose  we  weren't  going  to 
dress,  but  she  explained  she  didn't  put  on  this  coronation  robe 
for  you,  but  for  a  treat  for  me  before  I  telephoned,  and  hadn't 
time  to  change  back." 

And  when  Jane  cried  out,  as  they  entered  the  drawing- 
room,  "Good  heavens,  Rodney,  what  a  house !"  he  answered : 
"It  isn't  ours,  thank  God !  We  rented  it  for  a  year  in  a  sort 
of  honeymoon  delirium,  I  guess.  We  don't  live  up  to  it,  of 
course.  Nobody  could,  but  the  woman  who  built  it.  But  we 
do  our  damnedest." 

The  gaiety  in  his  voice  clouded  a  little  as  he  said  it,  and 
his  grin,  for  a  moment,  had  a  rueful  twist.  But  for  a  moment 
only.  Then  his  untempered  delight  in  the  possession  of  his 
old  friends  took  him  again  and,  with  the  exception  of  one  or 
two  equally  momentary  cloud-shadows,  lasted  all  evening. 

They  talked — heavens  how  they  talked !  It  was  like  the 
breaking  up  of  a  log-jam.  The  two  men  would  rush  along, 
side  by  side,  in  perfect  agreement  for  a  while,  catching  each 
other's  half  expressed  ideas,  and  hurling  them  forward,  and 
then  suddenly  they'd  meet,  head  on,  in  collision  over  some 
fundamental  difference  of  opinion,  amid  a  prismatic  spray 
of  epigram.  Jane  kept  up  a  sort  of  obbligato  to  the  show,  in 
serting  provocative  little  witticisms  here  and  there,  sometimes 
as  Rodney's  ally,  sometimes  as  her  husband's,  and  luring 


143  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

them,  when  she  could,  into  the  quiet  backwaters  of  meta 
physics,  where  she  was  more  than  a  match  for  the  two  of 
them.  Jane  could  juggle  Plato,  Bergson  and  William  James, 
with  one  hand  tied  behind  her.  But  when  she  incautiously 
ventured  out  of  this  domain,  as  occasionally  she  did — when, 
for  example,  she  confessed  herself  in  favor  of  a  censorship  of 
the  drama,  she  was  instantly  demolished. 

"The  state's  got  no  business  with  morals,"  said  Barry. 

"That's  the  real  cause  of  most  of  our  municipal  corrup 
tion,"  said  Rodney.  "A  city  administration,  for  instance,  is 
corrupt  exactly  in  ratio  to  its  attempt  to  be  moral.  The  more 
moral  issues  you  import  into  politics — gambling,  prostitution, 
Sunday  closing,  censored  movies,  and  the  rest — the  more  cor 
rupt  and  helpless  and  inefficient  your  government  will  be." 

And,  between  them,  for  the  next  half-hour,  they  kept  on 
demonstrating  it  until  the  roar  of  their  heavy  artillery  fairly 
drove  Jane  from  her  trenches. 

But  all  this  was  preliminary  to  the  main  topic  of  the  eve 
ning,  which  got  launched  when  Rodney  seized  the  advantage 
of  a  pause  to  say : 

"A  series  of  articles  on  women,  eh !  What  are  you  going  to 
do  to  them  ?" 

With  that  the  topic  of  feminism  was  on  the  carpet  and  it 
was  never  thereafter  abandoned.  "Utopia  to  Brass  Tacks," 
was  the  slogan  Barry's  chief  had  provided  him  with,  he  said. 
We  were  about  the  end  of  the  heroic  age  of  the  movement, 
the  age  of  myths  and  saints  and  prophecies.  A  transition 
was  about  due  to  smaller,  more  immediate  things.  The  quality 
of  the  leaders  would  probably  change.  The  heroines  of  the 
last  three  or  four  decades,  women  like  Naomi  Rutledge  Stan- 
ton,  to  take  a  fine  type  of  them  .  .  . 

"She's  my  mother,"  said  Rose. 

Barry  Lake's  aplomb  was  equal  to  most  situations,  but  it 
failed  him  here;  for  a  moment  he  could  only  stare.  The  con 
trast  between  the  picture  in  his  mind's  eye,  of  the  plain, 
square-toed,  high-principled  and  rather  pathetic  champion  of 
the  Cause — pathetic  in  the  light  of  what  she  hoped  from  it — 
facing  indifference  and  ridicule  with  the  calm  smile  of  one 


A   BIBTHDAY  143 

who  lias  climbed  her  mountain  and  looked  into  the  promised 
land, — between  that  and  the  lovely,  sensitive,  sensuous  crea 
ture  he  was  staring  at,  was  enough  to  stagger  anybody.  He 
got  himself  together  in  a  moment,  said  very  simply  and 
gravely  how  much  he  admired  her  and  how  high  a  value,  he 
believed,  the  future  would  put  on  her  work;  then  he  picked 
up  his  sentence  where  Eose  had  broken  it. 

The  heroines  and  the  prophets  were  going  to  be  replaced, 
he  believed,  by  leaders  much  more  practical  and  less  scrupu 
lous,  and  the  movement  would  follow  the  leaders.  As  far  as 
politics  went,  he  not  only  looked  for  no  millennium,  but  for 
a  reaction  in  the  other  direction.  There'd  be  more  open  graft, 
he  thought. 

Eose  asked  him  if  he  meant  that  he  thought  women  were 
less  honest  than  men. 

"It  isn't  a  lack  of  old-fashioned  honesty  that  makes  a  man 
a  grafter,"  he  said.  "It's  seeing  the  duties  and  privileges  of 
a  public  office  in  a  private  and  personal  way,  instead  of  in  a 
public,  impersonal  one ;  being  kind  to  old  friends  who  need  a 
helping  hand,  and  grateful  to  people  who've  held  out  helping 
hands  to  you.  Well,  and  women  have  been  trained  for  hun 
dreds  of  years  to  see  things  in  that  private  and  personal  way, 
and  to  exalt  the  private  and  personal  virtues.  Just  as  they've 
been  trained  to  stick  to  rule  of  thumb  methods  that  more  or 
less  work,  rather  than  to  try  experiments.  So,  on  the  whole, 
I  think  their  getting  the  vote  will  mean  that  politics  will  be 
crookeder  and  more  reactionary  than  they've  been  in  a  good 
many  years.  All  the  same  I'm  for  it,  because  it's  a  part  of 
democracy,  and  I'm  for  democracy  all  the  way.  N"ot  because 
you  get  good  government  out  of  it;  you  don't.  You  get  as 
good  as  you  desen^c,  and  in  the  long  run  I  think  a  society 
that  has  to  deserve  as  good  a  government  as  it  gets,  grows 
stronger  and  healthier  than  one  that  gets  a  better  government 
than  it  deserves." 

"That  old  tory  radical  over  there,"  said  Jane,  with  a  nod 
at  Eodney,  "has  been  grinning  away  for  half  an  hour  without 
saying  a  word.  I'd  like  to  know  what  you  think  about  it." 

"'Tory  radical'?"  questioned  Eose. 


144  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"That's  what  Barry  calls  him,"  Jane  explained.  "He's  so 
conservative  about  the  law  that  he  calls  Blackstone  an  up 
start  and  a  faker,  but  the  things  he'd  do,  when  it  comes  down 
to  cases — on  good  old  common  law  principles,  of  course,  would 
make  the  average  Progressive's  hair  curl.  Why,  when  people 
were  getting  excited  over  Eoosevelt's  recall  of  judicial  de 
cisions — remember? — Eodney  was  for  abolishing  the  Bill  of 
Rights  altogether." 

"What's  the  Bill  of  Eights?"  asked  Eose. 

Jane  headed  Eodney  off.  "Oh,  life,  liberty  and  property 
without  due  process  of  law,"  she  said.  "Xeither  of  these  men 
has  any  opinion  of  rights.  The  only  natural  inalienable  right 
you've  got,  they  say,  is  to  take  what  you  can  get  and  keep  it 
until  somebody  stronger  than  you,  that  you  can't  run  away 
from,  catches  you.  What  you  call  your  individual  rights  are 
just  what  society  has  made  and  doesn't  for  the  moment  need, 
to  keep  itself  going.  If  it  does  need  them,  it  takes  them 
back.  Only,  of  course,  it  has  got  to  keep  itself  going.  If  it 
doesn't,  people  get  up  and  kick  it  to  bits  and  start  again." 
She  turned  to  Eodney.  "But  what  do  you  think  about  it, 
really?  What  Barry's  been  talking  about,  I  mean.  Are  you 
for  it?" 

"For  what?"  Eodney  wanted  to  know. 

"For  what  women  want,"  said  Jane.  "Economic  independ 
ence,  equality,  easy  divorce — all  the  new  stuff." 

"I'm  not  against  it,"  Eodney  said,  "any  more  than  I'm 
against  to-morrow  being  Tuesday.  It's  going  to  be  Tuesday 
whether  I  like  it  or  not.  But  that  conviction  keeps  me  from 
crusading  for  it  very  hard.  What  I'm  curious  about  is  how 
it's  going  to  work.  When  they  get  what  they  want,  do  you 
suppose  they're  going  to  want  what  they  get?" 

"I  knew  there  was  something  deadly  about  your  grin,"  said 
Jane.  "What  are  you  so  cantankerous  about?" 

"Why,  the  thing,"  said  Eodney,  "that  sours  my  naturally 
sweet  disposition  is  this  economic  independence.  I've  been 
hearing  it  at  dinner  tables  all  winter.  When  I  hear  a  woman 
with  five  hundred  dollars'  worth  of  clothes  on — well,  no,  not 
on  her  back — and  anything  you  like  in  jewelry,  talking  about 


A   BIRTHDAY  145 

economic  independence  as  if  it  were  something  nice — jam 
on  the  pantry  shelf  that  we  men  were  too  greedy  to  let  them 
have  a  share  of — I  have  to  put  on  the  brakes  in  order  to  stay 
on  the  rails. 

"We  men  have  to  fight  for  economic  independence  from  the 
time  we're  twenty,  more  or  less,  till  the  time  we  die.  It's  a 
sentence  to  hard  labor  for  life ;  that's  what  economic  independ 
ence  is.  How  does  that  woman  think  she'd  set  about  it,  to 
make  her  professional  services  worth  a  hundred  dollars  a  day 
— or  fifty,  or  ten?  What's  she  got  that  has  a  market  value? 
What  is  there  that  she  can  capitalize  ?  She's  got  her  physical 
charm,  of  course,  and  there  are  various  professions  besides  the 
oldest  one,  where  she  can  make  it  pay.  Well,  and  what  else  ?" 

"She  can  bear  children,"  said  Jane.  "She  ought  to  be  paid 
well  for  that." 

"You're  only  paid  well,"  Eodney  replied,  "for  something 
you  can  do  exceptionally  well,  or  for  something  that  few  peo 
ple  can  do  at  all.  As  long  as  the  vast  majority  of  women 
can  bear  children,  the  only  women  who  could  get  well  paid 
for  it  would  be  those  exceptionally  qualified,  or  exceptionally 
proficient.  This  is  economics,  now  we're  talking.  Other  con 
siderations  are  left  out.  No,  I  tell  you.  Economic  independ 
ence,  if  she  really  got  it — the  kind  of  woman  I've  been  talking 
about — would  make  her  very,  very  sick." 

"She'd  get  over  being  sick  though,  wouldn't  she,"  said 
Rose,  "after  a  while?  And  then,  don't  you  think  she'd  be 
glad?" 

Rodney  laughed.  "The  sort  of  woman  I've  been  talking 
about,"  he  said,  "would  feel,  when  all  was  said,  that  she'd 
got  a  gold  brick." 

Rose  poured  his  coffee  with  a  steady  hand.  They  were  in 
the  library  by  now. 

"If  that's  so,"  she  said,  "then  the  kind  of  woman  you've 
been  talking  about  has  already  got  a  profession — the  one  you 
were  just  speaking  of  as — as  the  oldest.  As  Doctor  Randolph 
says,  she's  cashed  in  on  her  ankles.  But  maybe  you're  mis 
taken  in  thinking  she  wouldn't  choose  something  else  if  she 
had  a  chance.  Maybe  she  wouldn't  have  done  it,  except  be- 


146  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

cause  her  husband  wanted  her  to  and  she  was  in  love  with 
him  and  tried  to  please.  You  can't  always  tell." 

It  was  almost  her  first  contribution  to  the  talk  that  eve 
ning.  She  had  asked  a  few  questions  and  said  the  things  a 
hostess  has  to  say.  The  other  three  were  manifestly  taken  by 
surprise — Rodney  as  well  as  his  guests. 

But  surprise  was  not  the  only  effect  she  produced.  Her 
husband  had  never  seen  her  look  just  like  that  before  (re 
member,  he  had  not  been  a  guest  at  the  Randolphs'  dinner  on 
the  night  he  had  turned  her  out  of  his  office),  the  flash  in  her 
eyes,  the  splash  of  bright  color  in  her  cheeks. 

Barry  saved  him  the  necessity  of  trying  to  answer,  by  tak 
ing  up  the  cudgels  himself.  Rodney  didn't  feel  like  answer 
ing,  nor,  for  the  moment,  like  listening  to  Barry.  His  inter 
est  in  the  discussion  was  eclipsed  for  the  moment,  by  the 
thrill  and  wonder  of  his  wife's  beauty. 

He  walked  round  behind  her  chair,  on  the  pretext  of  get 
ting  his  coffee  cup,  and  rested  his  hand,  for  an  instant,  on 
her  bare  shoulder.  He  was  puzzled  at  the  absence  of  response 
to  the  caress.  For  there  was  none,  unless  you  could  call  it  a 
response  that  she  sat  as  still  as  ivory  until  he  took  his  hand 
away.  And  looking  into  her  face,  he  thought  she  had  gone 
pale.  Evidently  though,  it  was  nothing.  Her  color  came  back 
in  a  moment,  and  for  the  next  half-hour  she  matched  wits 
with  Barry  Lake  very  prettily. 

When  Jane  declared  that  they  must  go,  her  husband  pro 
tested. 

"I  haven't  managed  yet  to  get  a  word  out  of  Rodney  about 
any  of  his  things.  He  dodged  when  I  asked  him  how  his  Crim 
inal  Procedure  Reform  Society  was  getting  on,  and  he  changed 
the  subject  when  I  wanted  to  know  about  his  model  Expert 
Testimony  Act."  He  turned  on  Rodney.  "But  there's  one 
thing  you're  not  going  to  get  out  of.  I  want  to  know  how  far 
you've  come  along  with  your  book  on  Actual  Government.  It 
was  a  great  start  you  had  on  that,  and  a  bully  plan.  I  shan't 
let  you  off  any  details.  I  want  the  whole  thing.  Now." 

"I've  had  my  fling,"  said  Rodney,  with  a  sort  of  embar 
rassed  good  humor.  "And  I  don't  say  I  shall  never  have  an- 


A    BIRTHDAY  147 

other.  But  just  now,  there  are  no  more  intellectual  wild-oats 
for  me.  What  I  sow,  I  sow  in  a  field  and  in  a  furrow.  And 
I  take  good  care  to  be  on  hand  to  gather  the  crop.  Model 
Acts  and  Eeform  of  Procedure!  Have  you  forgotten  you're 
talking  to  a  married  man  ?" 

On  learning  their  determination  to  walk  down-town,  he 
said  he'd  go  with  them  part  of  the  way.  Would  Eose  go,  too  ? 
But  she  thought  not. 

"Well,  I  can't  pretend  to  think  you  need  it,"  he  admitted. 
Then,  turning  to  the  Lakes:  "You  people  must  spend  a  lot 
of  evenings  with  us  like  this.  You've  done  Rose  a  world  of 
good.  I  haven't  seen  her  look  so  well  in  a  month  of  Sun 
days." 


CHAPTER  IX 

A   DEFEAT 

THE  gown  that  Rodney  had  spoken  of  apologetically  to 
the  Lakes  as  a  coronation  robe,  was  put  away;  the  maid  was 
sent  to  bed.  Rose,  huddled  into  a  big  quilted  bath-robe,  and 
in  spite  of  the  comfortable  warmth  of  the  room,  feeling  cold 
clear  in  to  the  bones — cold  and  tremulous,  and  sure  that 
when  she  tried  to  talk  her  teeth  would  chatter — sat  waiting 
for  Rodney  to  come  back  from  seeing  the  Lakes  part  way 
home. 

It  was  over  an  hour  since  they  had  gone,  but  she  was  in  no 
hurry  for  his  return.  She  wanted  time  for  getting  things 
straight  before  he  came — for  letting  the  welter  subside  and 
getting  the  two  or  three  essentials  clear  in  her  mind.  She 
hadn't  cried  a  tear. 

The  old  Rose  would  have  cried — the  Rose  of  a  month  ago, 
before  that  devastating,  blinding  scene  with  Portia,  and  what 
had  happened  since.  She  even  managed  to  smile  a  little  sa 
tirically,  now,  over  the  way  that  child  would  have  taken  it. 
Here  it  was  their  first  anniversary  of  the  day — the  great  day 
in  their  two  lives — their  birthday,  as  well  as  his !  And  he'd 
forgotten  it!  He  had  remained  oblivious  that  morning,  in 
spite  of  all  the  little  evocative  references  she  had  made.  She 
hadn't  let  herself  be  hurt  about  that — not  much,  anyway;  had 
managed  to  smile  affectionately  over  his  masculine  obtuse- 
ness,  as  if  it  had  meant  no  more  to  her  than  it  would  have, 
say,  to  Frederica.  She  had  impressed  him  strongly,  though — 
or  tried  to — with  the  idea  that  the  evening  was  to  be  kept 
clear  just  for  their  two  selves.  And  then  she  had  arranged 
a  feast — a  homely  little  feast  that  was  to  culminate  in  a  cake 
with  a  hedge  of  little  candles  around  the  edge  for  his  birth 
day,  and  a  single  red  one  in  the  center,  for  theirs. 

Well,  and  that  was  only  part  of  it.   She  had  planned,  when 

148 


A   DEFEAT  149 

the  cake  should  have  come  in,  all  lighted  up,  and  the  servants 
had  gone  away  and  the  other  lights  had  been  put  out, — she 
had  planned  to  tell  him  her  great  news.  She  hadn't  told  him 
yet,  though  it  was  over  a  fortnight  since  her  visit  to  the 
doctor. 

She  had  no  reasoned  explanation  of  her  postponement  of 
it.  The  instinct  that  led  her  to  keep  it  wholly  to  herself, 
was  probably  one  of  the  reflections  of  that  morning  with  Por 
tia.  She  was  still  in  a  penitential  mood  when  she  went  to  the 
doctor — a  mood  which  the  contemplation  of  Portia's  frus 
trated  life  and  her  own  undeservedly  happy  one,  had  bitten 
deep  into  her  soul.  It  was  a  mood  that  nothing  but  pain 
could  satisfy.  The  only  relief  she  could  get  during  that  fort 
night  of  packing  and  leave-taking,  came  in  flogging  herself 
to  do  hard  things — things  that  hurt,  physically  and  literally, 
I  mean;  that  made  her  back  ache  and  cramped  the  muscles 
of  her  arms.  Her  spiritual  aches  were  too  contemptible  to 
pay  any  attention  to. 

Conversely,  in  that  mood,  the  thing  she  couldn't  endure, 
that  made  her  want  to  scream,  was  precisely  what,  all  her 
life,  she  had  taken  for  granted;  tenderness,  concern,  the 
smoothing  away  of  little  difficulties  for  which  the  people 
about  her  had  always  sacrificed  themselves.  That  mood  made 
it  hard  to  go  to  the  doctor.  But,  after  she  had  fainted  dead 
away  twice  in  one  morning,  a  saving  remnant  of  common 
sense — the  reflection  that  if  there  were  anything  organically 
wrong  with  her,  it  would  be  a  poor  trick  to  play  on  Eodney, 
not  to  take  remedial  measures  as  soon  as  possible — dictated 
the  action. 

When  the  doctor  told  her  what  had  happened,  she  was  a 
little  bewildered.  She  hadn't,  in  her  mind,  any  prepared 
background  for  the  news.  She  and  Eodney  had  decided  at 
the  beginning  not  to  have  any  children  for  the  first  year  or 
two — in  view  of  Eose's  extreme  youth,  the  postponement 
seemed  sensible — and  the  decision  once  made,  neither  of  them 
had  thought  much  more  about  it. 

Eodney*s  vigorously  objective  mind  had  always  been  so 
fully  occupied  with  things  as  they  were  that  it  found  little 


150  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

leisure  for  speculation  on  things  as  they  might  be.  The  day's 
work  was  always  so  vividly  absorbing  to  him  that  day-dreams 
never  got  a  chance.  His  sex  impulses  had  always  been 
crowded  down  to  the  smallest  possible  compass,  not  because 
he  was  a  Puritan,  but  because  he  was,  spiritually  and  men 
tally,  an  athlete.  He  had  never  thought  of  marriage  as  a 
serious  possibility,  Frederica's  efforts  to  the  contrary  notwith 
standing,  until,  in  a  moment  of  bewilderment,  he  found  him 
self  head  over  ears  in  love  with  Eose  Stanton.  That  this  emo 
tion  had  been  able  to  fight  its  way  into  the  fortress  of  his  life 
spoke  volumes  for  the  power  'and  the  vitality  of  it.  Once  it 
got  inside,  it  formed  a  part  of  the  garrison  of  the  fort.  And, 
just  as  the  contemplation  of  marriage  had  had  to  wait  until 
there  was  a  Eose  Stanton  to  make  it  concrete  and  irresistible, 
so  the  contemplation  of  fatherhood  would  have  to  wait  for  a 
concrete  fact  to  drive  it  home. 

"With  certain  important  differences,  Eose  was  a  good  deal 
like  him.  She  had  never  had  time  to  dream  much.  The  pre 
tending  games  of  childhood — playing  with  dolls,  playing 
house — had  never  attracted  her  away  from  more  vigorous  and 
athletic  enterprises.  A  superb  physique  gave  her  an  outlet  for 
her  emotional  energy,  so  that  she  satisfied  her  wants  pretty 
much  as  she  became  aware  of  them.  And,  conversely,  she  re 
mained  unaware  of  possibilities  she  had  not,  as  yet,  the  means 
to  realize. 

They  were  both  rather  abnormally  normal  about  this.  Per 
sons  of  robust  emotions  seldom  think  very  much  about  them. 
The  temperament  that  cultivates  its  emotional  soil  assidu 
ously,  warms  it,  waters  it  and  watches  anxiously  for  the  first 
sprouts,  gets  a  rather  anemic  growth  for  its  pains.  Which  of 
these  facts  is  cause  and  which  effect,  one  need  not  pretend  to 
say :  whether  it  is  a  lack  of  vitality  in  the  seed  that  prompts 
the  instinct  of  cultivation,  or  whether  it  is  the  cultivation 
that  prevents  a  sturdy  growth.  But,  feeble  as  the  results  of 
cultivation  may  be,  they  produce  at  least  the  apparent  advan 
tage  of  running  true  to  form.  The  thing  that  sprouts  in  cul 
tivated  soil  will  be  what  was.  planted  there — will  be,  at  all 
events,  appropriate. 


A   DEFEAT  151 

But  in  Rose's  penitential  mood,  and  in  the  absence  of  a 
prepared  background,  it  was  the  processes  of  her  pregnancy 
rather  than  the  issue  of  it,  that  got  into  the  foreground  of 
her  mind.  She  was  in  for  an  experience  now  that  no  one 
could  call  trivial.  She  had  months  of  misery  ahead  of  her, 
she  assumed,  reasoning  from  the  one  she  had  just  gone 
through  with,  surmounted  by  hours  of  agony  and  peril  that 
even  Portia  wouldn't  deny  the  authenticity  of. 

Well,  she  was  glad  of  it;  glad  she  was  going  to  be  hurt. 
She  could  get  back  some  of  her  self-respect,  she  thought,  by 
enduring  it  all,  first  the  wretchedness,  then  the  pain,  with  a 
Spartan  fortitude.  There  would  be  a  sort  of  savage  satisfac 
tion  in  marching  through  all  her  miseries  with  her  head  up. 

She  couldn't  do  that  if  Eodney  knew.  He  wouldn't  let  her. 
He'd  want  to  care  for  her,  comfort  her,  pack  her  in  cotton 
wool.  And  there  was  a  terrible  yearning  down  in  her  heart,  to 
let  him.  For  just  that  reason,  he  mustn't  be  told. 

But,  as  the  sharp  edges  of  this  mood  wore  off,  she  saw  a 
little  more  justly.  Already  he  suspected  something.  She 
caught,  now  and  again,  a  puzzled,  worried,  almost  frightened 
look  in  his  face.  It  was  a  poor  penance  that  others  had  to 
share.  So,  at  the  end  of  her  feast  to-night,  when  the  candles 
were  lighted  and  the  servants  gone  away,  she'd  tell  him.  And, 
oh,  what  a  comfort  it  would  be  to  have  him  know ! 

That  was  the  moment  she  was  waiting  for  when  he  tele 
phoned  that  he  was  bringing  the  Lakes  out  for  dinner.  The 
old  Eose  might  well  have  cried. 

But  now,  as  she  sat  trembling  in  front  of  her  little  boudoir 
fire,  the  door  open  behind  her  so  that  she'd  surely  hear  him 
when  he  came  in,  the  disappointment  and  the  hurt  that  had 
clutched  at  her  throat  when  she  turned  from  the  telephone, 
were  wholly  forgotten.  As  I  said,  she  hadn't  shed  a  tear. 

The  situation  she  was  confronted  with  now  was  beyond 
tears.  Portia's  stinging  words  went  over  and  over  through 
her  mind.  "If  you  let  the  big  thing  slip  out  of  your  hands 
because  you  haven't  the  pluck  to  fight  .  .  ."  and  her 
own,  "I  promise  I  won't  do  that."  It  would  mean  a  fight. 
She  must  keep  her  head. 


152  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

She  gave  a  last  panicky  shiver  when  she  heard  his  latch 
key,  then  pulled  herself  together. 

"Come  in  here,  Roddy,"  she  called,  as  he  reached  the  head 
of  the  stairs.  "I  want  to  talk  about  something." 

He  had  hoped,  evidently,  to  find  her  abed  and  fast  asleep. 
His  cautious  footfalls  on  the  stairs  made  clear  his  intention 
not  to  waken  her. 

"Oh,  I'm  sorry,"  he  said,  pausing  in  the  doorway  to  her 
dressing-room,  but  not  coming  in.  "I  didn't  know  you  meant 
to  sit  up  for  me.  If  I'd  known  you  were  waiting,  I'd  have 
come  back  sooner.  But  we  got  to  talking  and  we  were  at  the 
hotel  before  we  knew  it,  and  it  was  so  long  since  I'd  seen 
them.  .  .  ." 

"I  haven't  minded,"  she  told  him.  "I've  been  glad  of  a 
chance  to  think.  But  now  .  .  .  Oh,  please  come  in  and 
shut  the  door !" 

He  did  come  in,  but  with  manifest  reluctance,  and  he  stayed 
near  the  door  in  an  attitude  of  arrested  departure. 

"It's  pretty  late,"  he  protested  with  a  nonchalance  that  rang 
a  little  flat.  "You  must  be  awfully  tired.  Hadn't  we  better 
put  off  our  pow-wow?" 

She  understood  well  enough.  The  look  in  her  face,  some 
uncontrolled  inflection  in  the  voice  she  had  meant  to  keep  so 
even,  had  given  her  away.  He  suspected  she  was  going  to  be 
"tragic."  If  he  didn't  look  out,  there'd  be  a  "scene." 

"We  can't  put  it  off,"  she  said.  "I  let  you  have  your  talk 
out  with  the  Lakes,  but  you'll  have  to  talk  with  me  now." 

"We  spent  most  of  the  time  talking  about  you,  anyway," 
he  said  pleasantly.  "They're  both  mad  about  you.  Barry 
says  you've  got  a  fine  mind." 

She  laughed  at  that,  a  little  raggedly.  Whereupon  Rodney 
looked  hurt  and  protested  against  this  imputation  of  insin 
cerity  against  his  friend. 

"When  you  know  him  better,"  he  said,  "you  will  see  he 
couldn't  say  a  thing  like  that  unless  he  meant  it." 

"Oh,  he  meant  it,  all  right,"  said  Rose.  And  she  added 
incomprehensibly,  "It  isn't  his  fault,  of  course.  It's  just  the 
way  the  world's  made." 


A   DEFEAT  153 

She  had  been  in  good  looks  to-night,  she  knew;  hurt,  humili 
ated,  confronted  with  a  crisis,  she  had  rallied  her  powers  just 
as  she  had  done  at  the  Randolphs'  dinner.  She  had  been  aware 
of  the  color  in  her  cheeks,  the  brightness  in  her  eyes,  the  edge 
to  her  voice.  Each  of  the  two  men  had  responded  to  the  effect 
she  produced.  Barry  had  talked  with  her  all  the  last  part  of 
the  evening — brilliantly,  eagerly,  and  had  come  away  saying 
she  had  a  fine  mind.  Her  husband  had  come  across  to  her  and 
put  his  hand  on  her  bare  shoulder.  And  the  two  of  them 
had  responded  to  an  identical  impulse,  although  they  trans 
lated  it  so  differently — one  over  the  long  circuit,  the  other 
over  the  short. 

Lacking  the  clue,  Rodney,  of  course,  didn't  understand. 
The  look  in  Rose's  eyes  softened  suddenly. 

"Don't  mind,  dear,"  she  said.  "I'm  truly  glad  if  they 
liked  me.  It  will  make  things  a  lot  easier." 

At  that  his  eyes  lighted  up.  "Do  you  seriously  think  any 
one  could  resist  you,  you  darling?"  he  said.  "You  were  a 
perfect  miracle  to-night,  when  they  were  here.  But  now,  like 
this.  .  .  ."  He  came  over  to  her  with  his  arms  out. 

But  she  cried  out  "Don't !"  and  sprang  away  from  him. 
"Please  don't,  Roddy — not  to-night !  I  can't  stand  it  to  have 
Arou  touch  me  to-night !" 

He  stared  at  her,  gave  a  shrug  of  exasperation,  and  then 
turned  away.  "You  are  angry  about  something  then,"  he 
said.  "I  thought  so  when  I  first  came  in.  But  I  honestly 
don't  know  what  it's  about." 

"I'm  not  angry,"  she  said  as  steadily  as  she  could.  She 
mustn't  let  it  go  on  like  this.  They  were  getting  started  all 
wrong  somehow.  "You  didn't  want  me  to  touch  you,  the  night 
when  I  came  to  your  office,  when  you  were  working  on  that 
case.  But  it  wasn't  because  you  were  angry  with  me.  Well, 
I'm  like  that  to-night.  There's  something  that's  got  to  be 
thought  out.  Only,  I'm  not  like  you.  I  can't  do  it  alone. 
I've  got  to  have  help.  I  don't  want  to  be  soothed  and  com 
forted  like  a  child,  and  I  don't  want  to  be  made  love  to.  I 
just  want  to  be  treated  like  a  human  being." 

"I  see,"  he  said.    Very  deliberately  he  lighted  a  cigarette, 


154  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

found  himself  an  ash-tray  and  settled  down  astride  a  spind 
ling  little  chair.  (It  was  lucky  for  Florence  McCrae's  peace 
of  mind  that  she  didn't  see  him  do  it.)  "All  right/'  he  said. 
"Now,  come  on  with  your  troubles."  He  didn't  say  "little 
troubles,"  but  his  voice  did  and  his  smile.  The  whole  thing 
would  probably  turn  out  to  be  a  question  about  a  housemaid, 
or  a  hat. 

Eose  steadied  herself  as-  well  as  she  could.  She  simply 
mustn't  let  herself  think  of  things  like  that.  If  she  lost  her 
temper  she'd  have  no  chance. 

"We've  made  a  horrible  mistake,"  she  began.  "I  don't  sup 
pose  it's  either  of  our  faults  exactly.  It's  been  mine  in  a  way 
of  course,  because  it  wouldn't  have  happened  if  I  hadn't  been 
— thoughtless  and  ignorant.  I  might  have  seen  it  if  I'd 
thought  to  look.  But  I  didn't — not  really,  until  to-night." 

He  wanted  to  know  what  the  mistake  was.  He  was  still 
smiling  in  good-humored  amusement  over  her  seriousness. 

"It's  pretty  near  everything,"  she  said,  "about  the  way 
we've  lived — renting  this  house  in  the  first  place." 

He  frowned  and  flushed.  "Good  heavens,  child!"  he  said. 
"Can't  you  take  a  joke  ?  I  didn't  mean  anything  by  what  I 
said  about  the  house — except  that — well,  it  is  a  precious,  soul 
ful,  sacred — High  Church  sort  of  house,  and  we're  not  the  sort 
of  people,  thank  God — I'll  say  it  again — who'd  have  built  it 
and  furnished  it  for  ourselves.  You  aren't  right,  Eose.  You're 
ran  down  and  very  tired  and  hypersensitive,  or  you  wouldn't 
have  spent  an  evening  worrying  over  a  thing  like  that." 

"You  can  make  jokes  about  a  thing  that's  true,"  she  per 
sisted.  "And  it's  true  that  you've  hated  the  way  we've  lived 
— the  way  this  house  has  made  us  live. — No,  please  listen  and 
let  me  talk.  I  can't  help  it  if  my  voice  chokes  up.  My  mind's 
just  as  cool  as  yours  and  you've  got  to  listen.  It  isn't  the 
first  time  I've  thought  of  it.  It's  always  made  me  feel  a  little 
unhappy  when  people  have  laughed  about  the  'new  leaf  you've 
turned  over;  how  'civilized'  you've  got,  learning  all  the  new 
dances  and  going  out  all  the  time  and  not  doing  any-  of  the 
— wild  things  you  used  to  do.  In  a  joking  sort  of  way,  peo 
ple  have  congratulated  me  about  it,  as  if  it  were  some  sort 


'A   DEFEAT  155 

of  triumph  of  mine.  I  haven't  liked  it,  really.  But  I  never 
stopped  to  think  out  what  it  meant." 

"What  it  does  mean,"  he  said,  with  a  good  deal  of  attention 
to  his  cigarette,  "is  that  I've  fallen  in  love  with  you  and  mar 
ried  you  and  that  things  are  desirable  to  me  now,  because  I 
am  in  love  with  you,  that  weren't  desirable  before.  And 
things  that  were  desirable  before,  are  less  so.  I  don't  see  any 
thing  terrible  about  that." 

"There  isn't,"  she  said,  "when — when  you're  in  love  with 
me." 

He  shot  a  frowning  look  at  her  and  echoed  her  phrase  inter 
rogatively.  She  nodded. 

"Because  you  aren't  in  love  with  me  all  the  time.  And 
when  you  aren't,  you  must  see  what  I've  done  to  you.  You 
must — hate  me  for  what  I've  done  to  you.  I  remember  the 
first  day  we  ever  talked — when  you  brought  back  my  note 
books.  You  talked  about  people  who  wore  blinders  and  drew 
a  cart  and  followed  a  bundle  of  hay.  That's  what  I've  made 
you  do." 

His  face  flushed  deep.  He  sprang  to  his  feet  and  threw  his 
cigarette  into  the  fire.  "That's  perfectly  outrageous  non 
sense,"  he  said.  "I  won't  listen  to  it." 

"If  it  weren't  true,"  she  persisted,  "you  wouldn't  be  ex 
cited  like  that.  If  I  hadn't  known  it  before,  I'd  have  known 
it  when  I  saw  you  with  the  Lakes.  You  can  give  them  some 
thing  you  can't  give  me,  not  with  all  the  love  in  the  world.  I 
never  heard  about  them  till  to-night — not  in  a  way  I'd  remem 
ber.  And  there  are  other  people — you  spoke  of  some  of  them 
at  dinner — who  are  living  here,  that  you've  never  men 
tioned  to  me  before.  You've  tried  to  sweep  them  all  out  of 
your  life ;  to  go  to  dances  and  the  opera  and  things  with  me. 
You  did  it  because  you  loved  me,  but  it  wasn't  fair  to  either 
of  us,  Roddy.  Because  }rou  can't  love  me  all  the  time.  I  don't 
believe  a  man — a  real  man — can  love  a  woman  all  the  time. 
And  if  she  makes  him  hate  her  when  he  doesn't  love  her,  he'll 
get  so  he  hates  loving  her." 

"You're  talking  nonsense !"  he  said  again  roughly.  He  was 
pacing  the  room  by  now.  "Stark  staring  nonsense !" 


156  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

Of  course  the  reason  it  caught  him  like  that  was  simply  that 
it  echoed  so  uncannily  the  things  that  went  through  his  own 
head  sometimes  in  his  stolen  hours  of  solitude — thoughts  he 
had  often  tried,  uhavailingly,  to  stamp  out  of  existence. 

"I'd  like  to  know  where  you  get  that  stuff.  Is  it  from 
James  Randolph?  He's  dangerous,  that  fellow.  Oh,  he's 
interesting,  and  I  like  him,  but  he's  a  cynic.  He  doesn't  want 
anybody  to  be  happier  than  he  is.  But  what  may  be  true  of 
him,  isn't  true  of  me.  I've  never  stopped  loving  you  since  the 
first  day  we  talked  together.  And  I  should  think  I'd  done 
enough  to  prove  it." 

"That's  it,"  she  said.  "You've  done  too  much.  And  you're 
so  sorry  for  me  when  you  don't  love  me,  that  it  makes  you  do 
all  the  more." 

She  had  found  another  joint  in  his  armor.  She  was  ab 
solutely  clairvoyant  to-night,  and  this  time  he  fairly  cried 
out,  "Stop  it !" 

Then  he  got  himself  together  and  begged  her  pardon. 
"After  all,  I  don't  see  what  it  comes  to,"  he  said.  "I  don't 
know  what  we're  righting  about  to-night.  You're  saying  you 
think  we  ought  to  do  more  playing  around  with  the  Lakes 
and  people  like  that;  not  spend  all  our  time  with  the  Casino 
set,  as  we  have  done  this  winter.  Well,  that  may  be  good 
sense.  I've  no  objection  certainly." 

"Well,  then,"  she  said,  "that's  settled— that's  one  thing 
settled.  But  there's  something  else.  Oh,  it  all  comes  to  the 
same  thing,  really.  Roddy," — she  had  to  gulp  and  draw  a 
long  breath  and  steady  herself  before  this — "Roddy,  how 
much  money  have  you  got,  and  how  much  are  we  spending?" 

"Oh,  good  lord !"  he  cried.  "Please  don't  go  into  that  now, 
Rose.  It's  after  one  o'clock,  and  you're  worn  to  a  frazzle.  If 
we've  got  to  go  into  it,  let's  do  it  some  other  time,  when  we 
can  be  sensible  about  it." 

"When  I  am,  you  mean?" 

"Yes,"  he  said. 

f<Well,  I'm  sensible  now.  I  can't  help  it  if  my — voice 
chokes  and  my  eyes  fill  up.  That's  silly,  of  course,  but  clown 
in  my  mind,  I  don't  believe  I've  ever  been  as  sensible  as  I  am 


A    DEFEAT  157 

right  now.  And  I've  had  the  nerve  to  ask — I  don't  know 
when  I  will  again — and  I  know  you  won't  bring  the  subject 
up  by  yourself.  I've  been  trying  to  for  ever  so  long.  But 
money's  always  seemed  the  one  thing  I  couldn't  b-bear  to  talk 
about  with  you. 

"You  see,  when  I  first  told  mother  and  Portia  about  3*011 — 
about  how  you  helped  me  with  the  conductor  that  night,  I 
told  them  your  name,  and  Portia  said  she  didn't  think  it 
could  be  you,  because  you  were  a  millionaire.  I  supposed  she 
knew.  Anyway,  I  didn't  think  very  much  about  it.  You 
yourself, — just  being  with  you  and  hearing  you  talk,  were  so 
much  more  important.  After  we  got  engaged,  and  you  began 
doing  all  sorts  of  lovely  things  for  me,  I  enjoyed  it  of  course. 
But  it  was  just  something  that  went  with  you.  After  we  were 
married  and  took  this  house  .  .  .  Well,  I  knew,  of  course, 
I  hadn't  married  you  for  money,  but  I  thought  it  would  sound 
sort  of  queer  and  prying  to  ask  questions  about  it;  because  I 
hadn't  anything." 

He  had  looked  up  two  or  three  times  and  drawn  in  his 
breath  for  a  protest,  but  apparently  he  couldn't  think  of  any 
thing  effective  to  say.  Now  though,  he  cried  out,  "Bose! 
Please !" 

But  she  went  steadily  on.  "You  were  always  so  dear  about 
it.  You  never  let  me  feel  like  a  beggar,  and — well,  it  was  the 
easy  way,  and  I  took  it.  I  got  worried  once  during  the  winter 
when  I  heard  the  Crawfords  talking.  All  those  people  were 
millionaires,  I'd  supposed.  They  were  going  on  at  a  dinner 
here,  one  night,  about  being  awfully  hard  up,  and  I  began 
to  wonder  if  we  were.  I  spent  a  week  trying  to — get  up  my 
courage  to  ask  you  about  it.  But  then  Constance  got  a  new 
necklace  on  her  birthday,  and  they  went  off  to  Palm  Beach 
the  next  week,  so  I  persuaded  myself  it  was  all  a  joke.  The 
thing's  come  up  again  several  times  since,  but  never  so  that 
I  couldn't  side-step  it  some  way,  until  to-night.  But  to-night 
— oh,  Roddy  .  .  . !"  Her  silly  ragged  voice  choked  there 
and  stopped  and  the  tears  brimmed  up  and  spilled  down  her 
cheeks.  But  she  kept  her  face  steadfastly  turned  to  his. 

"That's  what  I  said  about  being  married  and  not  sowing 


158 

wild  oats,  I  suppose,"  he  said  glumly.  "It  was  a  joke.  Do 
you.  suppose  I'd  have  said  it  if  I  meant  it?" 

"It  wasn't  only  that/'  she  managed  to  go  on.  "It  was  the 
way  they  looked  at  the  house ;  the  way  you  apologized  for  my 
dress;  the  way  you  looked  when  you  tried  to  get  out  of  an 
swering  Barry  Lake's  questions  about  what  you  were  doing. 
Oh,  how  I  despised  myself !  And  how  I  knew  you  and  they 
must  be  despising  me !" 

"The  one  thing  I  felt  about  you  all  evening/'  he  said,  with 
the  patience  that  marks  the  last  stage  of  exasperation,  "was 
pride.  I  was  rather  crazily  proud  of  you." 

"As  my  lover  you  were  proud  of  me,"  she  said.  "Bi;t  the 
other  man — the  man  that's  more  truly  you — was  ashamed,  as 
I  was  ashamed.  Oh,  it  doesn't  matter !  Being  ashamed 
won't  accomplish  anything.  But  what  we'll  do  is  going  to 
accomplish  something." 

"What  do  you  mean  to  do?"  he  asked. 

"I  want  you  to  tell  me  first,"  she  said,  "how  much  money 
we  have,  and  how  much  we've  been  spending." 

"I  don't  know,"  he  said  stubbornly.  "I  don't  know  ex 
actly." 

"You've  got  enough,  haven't  you,  of  your  own  ...  I 
mean,  there's  enough  that  comes  in  every  year,  to  live  on,  if 
you  didn't  earn  a  cent  by  practising  law?  Well,  what  I  want 
to  do,  is  to  live  on  that.  I  want  to  live  however  and  wherever 
we  have  to  to  live  on  that — out  in  the  suburbs  somewhere,  or 
in  a  flat,  so  that  you  will  be  free;  and  I  can  work — be  some 
sort  of  help.  Barry  and  the  others — your  real  friends,  that 
you  really  care  about,  won't  mind.  And  as  long  as  we  want 
to  get  rid  of  the  other  people  anyway,  that's  the  way  to  do  it." 

"You  can  wash  the  dishes  and  scrub  the  floors,"  he  supple 
mented,  "and  I  can  carry  my  lunch  to  the  office  with  me  in  a 
little  tin  box."  He  looked  at  his  watch.  "And  now  that  the 
thing's  reduced  to  an  absurdity,  let's  go  to  bed.  It's  getting 
along  toward  two  o'clock." 

"You  don't  have  to  get  to  the  office  till  nine  to-morrow 
morning,"  said  Rose.  "And  I  want  to  talk  it  out  now.  And 
I  don't  think  I  said  anything  that  was  absurd." 


A    DEFEAT  159 

The  devil  of  it  was  she  hadn't.  The  precise  quality  about 
her  suggestions  that  pointed  and  barbed  them,  was  their  fan 
tastic  logic.  It  would  be  ridiculous — impossible — to  uproot 
their  life  as  she  wanted  it  done.  One  simply  couldn't  do  such 
a  tiling.  Serious  discussion  of  it  was  preposterous.  But  to 
explain  why  .  .  . !  He  was  apt  enough  at  explanations 
generally.  This  one  seemed  to  present  difficulties. 

"I  shouldn't  have  called  it  absurd,"  he  admitted  after  a 
rather  long  silence.  "But  it's  exaggerated  and  unnecessary.  I 
don't  care  to  make  a  public  proclamation  that  I'm  not  able  to 
support  you  and  run  our  domestic  establishment  in  a  way  that 
we  find  natural  and  agreeable ; — and  that  I've  been  a  fool  to 
try.  The  situation  doesrft  call  for  it.  You've  made  a  moun 
tain  out  of  an  ant-hill.  "\Vhen  our  lease  is  up,  if  we  think  this 
house  is  more  than  we  want,  we  can  find  something  simpler." 

"But  we'll  begin  economizing  now,"  she  pleaded;  "change 
things  as  much  as  we  can,  even  if  we  do  have  to  go  on  living 
in  this  house.  It  won't  hurt  me  a  bit  to  work,  and  you  could 
go  back  to  your  book.  We'd  both  be  happier,  if  I  were  some 
thing  besides  just  a  drag  on  3rou." 

"Discharge  a  couple  of  maids,  you  mean,"  he  asked,  "and 
sweep  and  make  beds  and  that  sort  of  thing  yourself  ?" 

"I  don't  know  exactly  how  we'd  do  it,"  she  said.  "That's 
why  I  said  I  needed  your  help  in  figuring  it  out.  Something 
like  that,  I  suppose.  Sweeping  and  making  beds  isn't  very 
much,  but  it's  something." 

"The  most  we  could  save  that  way,"  he  said,  "would  be  a 
few  hundred  dollars  a  year.  It  wouldn't  be  a  drop  in  the 
bucket.  But  everything  would  run  at  cross-purposes.  You'd 
be  tired  out  all  the  time — you're  that  pretty  much  as  it  is 
lately,  we'd  have  to  stop  having  people  in ;  you'd  be  bored  and 
I'd  be  worried.  When  you  start  living  on  a  certain  scale, 
everything  about  your  life  has  to  be  done  on  that  scale.  Next 
October,  as  I  said,  when  the  lease  on  this  house  runs  out,  we 
can  manage,  perhaps,  to  change  the  scale  a  little.  There  you 
are !  Now  do  stop  worrying  about  it  and  let's  go  to  bed." 

But  she  sat  there  just  as  she  was,  staring  at  the  dying  fire, 
her  hands  lying  slack  in  her  lap,  all  as  if  she  hadn't  heard. 


160  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

The  long  silence  irked  him.  He  pulled  out  his  watch,  looked 
at  it  and  began  winding  it.  He  mended  the  fire  so  that  it 
would  be  safe  for  the  night;  bolted  a  window.  Every  minute 
or  two,  he  stole  a  look  at  her,  but  she  was  always  just  the 
same.  Except  for  the  faint  rise  and  fall  of  her  bosom,  she 
might  have  been  a  picture,  not  a  woman. 

At  last  he  said  again,  "Come  along,  Rose,  dear." 

"It'll  be  too  late  in  October,"  she  said.  "That's  why  I 
wanted  to  decide  things  to-night.  Because  we  must  begin 
right  away/'  Then  she  looked  up  into  his  face.  "It  will  be 
too  late  in  October,"  she  repeated,  "unless  we  begin  now." 

The  deep  tense  seriousness  of  her  voice  and  her  look  arrested 
his  full  attention. 

"Why  ?"  he  asked.    And  then,  "Rose,  what  do  you  mean  ?" 

"We're  going  to  have  a  baby  in  October,"  she  said. 

He  stared  at  her  for  a  minute  without  a  word,  then  drew 
in  a  deep  breath  and  pressed  his  hands  against  his  eyes.  All 
he  could  say  at  first  was  just  her  name.  But  he  dropped  down 
beside  her  and  got  her  in  his  arms. 

"So  that's  it,"  he  said  raggedly  at  last.  "Oh,  Rose,  darling, 
it's  such  a  relief !  I've  been  so  terrified  about  you — so  afraid 
something  had  gone  wrong.  And  you  wouldn't  let  me  ask, 
and  you  seemed  so  unhappy.  I'd  even  thought  of  talking  to 
Randolph.  I  might  have  guessed,  I  suppose.  I've  been  stupid 
about  it.  But,  you  darling,  I  understand  it  all  now." 

She  didn't  see  just  what  he  meant  by  that,  but  she  didn't 
care.  It  was  such  a  wonderful  thing  to  stop  fighting  and  let 
the  tension  relax,  cuddle  close  into  his  embrace,  and  know 
nothing  in  the  world  but  the  one  fact  that  he  loved  her ;  that 
their  tale  of  golden  hours  wasn't  spent — was,  perhaps,  illim 
itable.  She  was  even  too  drowsily  happy  to  think  what  he 
meant  when  he  said  a  little  later : 

"So  now  you  won't  let  anything  trouble  you,  will  you, 
child  ?  And  if  queer  worrying  ideas  get  into  your  head  about 
the  way  we  live,  and  about  being  a  drag  on  me  and  making 
me  hate  you,  you'll  laugh  at  them?  You'll  be  able  to  laugh, 
because  you'll  know  why  they're  there." 

It  wasn't  until  the  next  day  that  she  recalled  that  remark 


A   DEFEAT  161 

of  his  and  analyzed  it.  It  meant,  of  course,  that  she  was 
beaten;  that  her  first  fight  for  the  big  thing  had  been  in  vain. 
There  would  be  no  use,  for  the  present,  in  renewing  the 
struggle.  He'd  taken  the  one  ground  that  was  impregnable. 
So  long  as  he  could  go  on  honestly  interpreting  every  plea 
of  hers  for  a  share  in  the  hard  part  of  his  life  as  well  as  in 
the  soft  part  of  it,  for  a  way  of  life  that  would  make  them 
something  more  than  lovers — as  wholly  subjective  to  herself, 
the  inevitable  accompaniment  of  her  physical  condition — • 
the  pleas  and  the  struggles  would  indeed  be  wasted.  She'd 
have  to  wait. 


CHAPTEE  X 

THE   DOOR  THAT   WAS   TO   OPEN 

SHE  would  have  to  wait.  Accepted,  root  and  branch,  as 
Rose  was  forced  by  her  husband's  attitude  to  accept  it,  a  con 
clusion  of  that  sort  can  be  a  wonderful  anodyne.  And  so  it 
proved  in  her  case.  Indeed,  within  a  day  after  her  talk  with 
Rodney,  though  it  had  ended  in  total  defeat,  she  felt  like  a 
person  awakened  out  of  a  nightmare.  There  had  taken  place, 
somehow,  an  enormous  letting-off  of  strain — a  heavenly  re 
laxation  of  spiritual  muscles.  It  was  so  good  just  to  have 
him  know;  to  have  others  know,  as  all  her  world  did  within 
the  next  week! 

Ultimately  nothing  was  changed,  of  course.  The  great 
thing  that  she  had  promised  Portia  she  wouldn't  fail  in  get 
ting — the  real  thing  that  should  solve  the  problem,  equalize 
the  disparity  between  her  husband  and  herself  and  give  them 
a  life  together  in  satisfying  completeness  beyond  the  joys  of 
a  pair  of  lovers; — that  was  still  to  be  fought  for. 

She'd  have  to  make  that  fight  alone.  Rodney  wouldn't  help 
her.  He  wouldn't  know  how  to  help  her.  Indeed,  interpret 
ing  from  the  way  he  winced  under  her  questions  and  sugges 
tions,  as  if  they  wounded  some  essentially  masculine,  primi 
tive  element  of  pride  in  him,  it  seemed  rather  more  likely 
that  he'd  resist  her  efforts — fight  blindly  against  her.  She 
must  be  more  careful  about  that  when  she  took  up  the  fight 
again;  must  avoid  hurting  him  if  she  could. 

She  hadn't  an  idea  on  what  lines  the  fight  was  to  be  made. 
Perhaps  before  the  time  for  its  beginning,  a  way  would  ap 
pear.  The  point  was  that  for  the  present,  she'd  have  to  wait 
— coolly  and  thoughtfully,  not  fritter  her  strength  away  on 
futile  struggles  or  harassments. 

The  tonic  effect  of  that  resolution  was  really  wonderful. 

162 


THE    DOOR   THAT   WAS   TO    OPEX          163 

She  got  lier  color  back — I  mean  more  than  just  the  pink  bloom 
in  her  cheeks — and  her  old,  irresistible,  wide  slow  smile.  She'd 
never  been  so  beautiful  as  she  was  during  the  next  six  months. 

People  who  thought  they  loved  her  before — Frederica  for 
example,  found  they  hadn't  really,  until  now.  She  dropped 
in  on  Eleanor  Randolph  one  day,  after  a  morning  spent  with 
Rose,  simply  because  she  was  bursting  with  this  idea  and  had 
to  talk  to  somebody.  That  was  very  like  Frederica. 

She  found  Eleanor  doing  her  month's  bills,  but  glad  to 
shovel  them  into  her  desk,  light  up  a  cigarette,  and  have  a 
chat;  a  little  rueful  though,  when  she  found  that  Rose  was 
to  be  the  subject  of  it. 

"She's  perfectly  wonderful,"  Frederica  said.  "There's  a 
sort  of  look  about  her  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  I  know,"  Eleanor  said.   "We  dined  there  last  night." 

"Well,  didn't  it  just — get  you?"  insisted  Frederica. 

"It  did,"  said  Eleanor.  "It  also  got  Jim.  He  was  still 
talking  about  her  when  I  went  to  sleep,  about  one  o'clock.  I 
don't  a  bit  blame  him  for  being  perfectly  maudlin  about  her. 
As  I  say,  I  was  a  good  deal  that  way  myself,  though  a  half- 
hour's  steady  raving  was  enough  for  me.  But  poor  old 
Jim !  She  isn't  one  little  bit  crazy  about  him,  either — unfor 
tunately." 

"fnfortunately !"  thought  Frederica.  This  was  rather  il 
luminating.  The  Randolphs'  love-match  had  been  regarded 
as  establishing  a  sort  of  standard  of  excellence.  But  when 
you  heard  a  woman  trying  to  arrange  subsidiary  romances 
for  her  husband,  or  lamenting  the  failure  of  them,  it  meant, 
as  a  rule,  that  things  were  wearing  rather  thin.  However, 
she  dismissed  this  speculation  for  a  later  time,  and  went  back 
to  Rose. 

"I  had  been  worrying  about  her,  too,"  she  said.  "Rodney 
was  so  funny  about  her.  He  was  worried,  I  could  see  that. 
And  he  means  the  best  in  the  world,  the  dear.  But  he  could  be 
a  dreadful  brute,  just  in  his  simplicity.  Oh,  I  know!  He 
and  I  were  always  rather  special  pals — more  than  Harriet. 
But  no  man  ever  learned  less  from  his  sisters, — about  women, 
I  mean.  He's  always  been  so  big  and  healthy  and  even- 


164  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

minded,  you  couldn't  tell  him  anything,  except  what  you 
could  print  right  out  in  black  and  white.  So  when  you  were 
feeling  edgy  and  blue  and  miserable  you  either  kept  out  of 
his  way  or  kept  your  troubles  to  yourself.  He  was  always 
easy  to  fool — there  was  that  about  it.  If  you  wiped  your 
eyes  and  blew  your  nose,  he  always  thought  you  had  a  cold. 
Which  is  all  very  nice  about  a  brother;  but  in  a  hus 
band  .  .  ." 

Something  that  Eleanor  did  with  her  shoulders,  the  way 
she  blew  out  her  smoke  and  twisted  her  mouth  around,  caught 
Frederica's  eye.  "What  did  you  mean  by  that?"  she  asked. 
"Oh,  I  know  you  didn't  say  anything." 

Eleanor  got  up  restlessly,  squared  the  cushions  on  her 
chaise  longue,  tapped  her  cigarette  ash  into  a  receiver  and 
said  that  Rose  was  happy  enough  now,  anyway,  if  looks  were 
anything  to  go  by;  hesitated  again,  and  finally  answered 
Frederica's  question. 

"Why,"  she  said,  "whenever  I  hear  a  woman  miaouling 
about  being  misunderstood,  I  always  want  to  tell  her  she 
doesn't  know  her  luck.  Wait  till  she  marries  a  man  who 
really  does  understand — too  well.  Let  her  see  how  she  likes 
it,  whenever  she  turns  loose  and  gets — going  a  little,  to  have 
him  look  interested,  as  if  he  were  taking  notes,  and  begin 
asking  questions  that  are — a  little  too  intelligent.  How  does 
she  think  it'll  feel  never  to  know,  never — I  mean  that,  that 
she  isn't  being — experimented  on!" 

It  was  a  rather  horrible  idea,  Frederica  didn't  try  to  deny 
it.  But  not  being  understood  wasn't  very  agreeable  either. 
What  did  they  want  then? 

Eleanor  laughed.  "Did  you  ever  think,"  she  asked,  "that 
one  of  these  regular  stage  husbands  would  be  rather  satisfac 
tory?  Terribly  particular,  you  know,  and  bossy  and  domi 
neering.  The  kind  that  discovers  a  letter  or  a  handkerchief 
or  sees  you  going  into  some  other  man's  'rooms'  and  gets 
frightfully  jealous,  and  denounces  you  without  giving  you  a 
chance  to  explain,  and  drags  you  round  by  the  hair  and 
threatens  to  kill  you?  And  then  discovers — in  the  last  act, 
you  know, — that  you  were  perfectly  innocent  all  the  while, 


THE    DOOR    THAT    WAS    TO    OPEN          165 

and  repents  all  over  the  place  and  begs  you  to  forgive  him 
and  take  him  back ;  and  you  do  ?  Do  you  suppose  any  of  the 
men  we  know  would  be  capable  of  acting  like  that?  Don't 
you  think  we'd  like  it  if  they  were?  Not  if  they  really  did 
those  things,  perhaps,  but  if  we  thought  they  might?" 

Frederica  was  amused,  but  didn't  think  there  was  much  to 
that.  Of  course,  if  the  play  was  very  thrilling,  and  you  liked 
the  leading  man,  you  might  build  yourself  into  the  romance 
somehow.  But  when  it  came  to  the  real  thing  .  .  . 

"No,  there  is  something  in  it,"  Eleanor  insisted.  "There's 
something  you  can't  get  in  any  other  way.  Whom  do  you 
think  I'd  pick,"  she  asked  suddenly,  "for  the  happiest  wife  I 
know?  Edith  Welles.  Yes,  really.  Oh,  I  know,  her  hus 
band's  a  slacker  and  no  real  good  to  anybody.  And  he  goes 
out  every  now  and  then  and  drinks  too  much  and  doesn't 
know  just  what  happens  afterward.  But  he  always  comes 
back  and  wants  to  be  forgiven.  And  he  thinks  she's  an  angel, 
• — which  she  is — and  he  thinks  he  isn't  worthy  to  put  on  her 
rubbers — which  he  isn't,  and — well,  there  you  are !  She 
knows  she's  got  him,  somehow. 

"But  you  take  Jim.  I  can  get  my  way  with  him  always. 
I  can  outmaneuver  him  every  time.  He's  positively  simple 
about  things,  unless  they  happen  to  strike  him — profession 
ally.  But  there's  always  something  that  gets  away.  Some 
thing  I'm  no  nearer  now  than  I  was  the  day  I  first  saw  him. 
And  I  sometimes  think  that  if  there  were — something  horri 
ble  I  had  to  forgive  him  for — if  I  could  get  something  on 
him  as  they  say  .  .  .  It's  rather  fun,  isn't  it,  sometimes, 
just  to  let  your  mind  go  wild  and  see  where  you  bring  up. 
Awful  rot,  of  course.  Can  you  stop  for  lunch?" 

Frederica  thought  she  couldn't;  must  run  straight  along. 
But  the  talk  had  been  amusing.  "Only — you  won't  mind? — 
don't  spring  any  of  that  stuff  on  Eose.  She's  just  a  child, 
really  you  know,  and  entitled  to  any  illusions  that  Rodney 
leaves;  especially  these  days." 

"You,  as  an  old  hen  fussing  about  your  new  chicken!" 
Eleanor  mocked.  "Wait  till  you  can  look  the  part  a  little 
better,  Frederica,  dear.  But  really,  I'm  harmless.  Talk  to 


166  THE   REAL   ADVENTUEE 

Jim  and  Eodney  and  those  fearful  and  wonderful  Lakes  of 
his.  They  were  there,  and — well,  you  ought  to  have  heard 
the  talk.  I  thought  I  was  pretty  well  hardened,  but  once  or 
twice  I  gasped.  Jim's  pretty  weird  when  he  gets  going,  but 
that  Barry  Lake  has  a  sort  of — surgical  way  of  discussing 
just  anything,  and  his  wife's  as  bad.  Oh,  she's  awfully  inter 
esting,  I'll  admit  that,  and  she's  as  crazy  about  Eose  as  any 
of  the  rest  of  us,  which  is  to  her  credit. 

"We  never  got  off  women  all  the  evening.  Barry  Lake  had 
their  history  down  from  the  early  Egyptians,  and  Jim  had 
an  endless  string  of  pathological  freaks  to  tell  about.  And 
then  Eodney  came  out  strong  for  economic  independence, 
only  with  his  own  queer  angle  on  it  of  course.  He  thought  it 
would  be  a  fine  thing,  but  it  wouldn't  happen  until  the  men 
insisted  on  it.  When  a  girl  wasn't  regarded  as  marriageable 
unless  she  had  been  trained  to  a  trade  or  a  profession,  then 
things  would  begin  to  happen.  I  think  he  meant  it,  too, 
though  he  was  more  than  usually  outrageous  in  his  way  of 
putting  things. 

"Well,  and  all  the  while  there  sat  Eose,  taking  it  all  in  with 
those  big  eyes  of  hers,  smiling  to  herself  now  and  then;  say 
ing  things,  too,  sometimes,  that  were  pretty  good,  though  no 
body  but  Jim  seemed  to  understand,  always,  just  what  she 
meant.  They've  talked  before,  those  two.  But  she  didn't 
mind — anything;  no  more  embarrassed  than  as  if  we'd  been 
talking  embroidery  stitches.  You  don't  need  to  worry  about 
her.  And  she  absolutely  seemed  to  like  Jane  Lake." 

Frederica  did  worry.  Seriously  meditated  running  in  on 
Eodney  before  she  went  home  to  lunch  and  giving  him -a  tip 
that  a  young  wife  in  Eose's  condition  wanted  treating  a  little 
more  carefully.  It  was  not  for  prudential  reasons  that  she 
decided  against  doing  it.  She  was  perfectly  willing  to  have 
her  head  bitten  off  in  a  good  cause.  But  she  knew  Eodney 
down  to  the  ground ;  knew  that  it  was  utterly  impossible  for 
him,  whatever  his  previous  resolutions  might  be,  to  pull  up 
on  the  brink  of  anything.  Once  you  launched  a  topic  that 
interested  him,  he'd  go  through  with  it.  So  the  only  thing 
that  would  do  any  good  would  be  to  ban  the  Lakes  and  James 


THE   DOOR   THAT   WAS   TO   OPEX          167 

Randolph  completely.  And  Rodney,  if  persuaded  to  do  that 
— he  would  in  a  minute,  of  course,  if  he  thought  it  would  be 
good  for  Rose — would  be  incapable  of  concealing  from  her 
why  he  had  done  it;  which  would  leave  matters  worse  than 
ever. 

The  only  outcome,  then,  of  her  visit  to  Eleanor  and  her 
subsequent  cogitations,  was  that  Martin,  when  he  came  home 
that  night,  found  her  unusually  affectionate  and  inclined  to 
be  misty  about  the  eyes.  "I'm  a — lucky  guy,  all  right" — 
this  was  her  explanation, — "being  married  to  you.  Instead  of 
any  of  the  others." 

He  was  a  satisfactory  old  dear.  He  took  her  surplus  ten 
derness  as  so  much  to  the  good,  and  didn't  bother  over  not 
knowing  what  it  was  all  about. 

Eleanor  was  right  in  her  surmise  that  Rose  had  really 
taken  a  fancy  to  Jane  Lake.  She  was  truly — and  really 
humbly — grateful  to  Jane,  in  the  first  place,  for  liking  her, 
finding  her,  in  Jane's  own  phrase,  "worth  while,"  and  her 
ideas  worth  listening  to.  Because  here  was  something,  you 
see,  that  she  could  take  at  its  face  value.  There  was  no  long- 
circuited  sex  attraction  to  discount  everything,  in  Jane's  case. 
But  she  had  another  reason. 

Rodney,  it  seemed,  had  told  the  Lakes  about  the  pros 
pective  baby  the  very  morning  after  he'd  learned  the  news 
himself,  and  Jane — this  was  perfectly  characteristic  of  her — 
had  come  straight  up  to  see  Rose  about  it ;  even  before  Fred- 
erica.  And  about  the  first  thing  she  said  was: 

"Which  do  you  want — a  boy  or  a  girl?" 

Rose  looked  puzzled,  then  surprised.  "Why,"  she  said  at 
last,  "I  don't  believe  I  know." 

"It's  funny  about  that,"  said  .Jane.  "The  one  thing  I  was 
frightened  about — the  first  time,  you  know — was  that  it 
might  be  a  girl.  I  think  Barry  really  wanted  a  girl,  too.  He 
does  now,  and  we're  going  to  try  to  have  one,  though  we  can't 
rightly  afford  it.  But  I'm  just  primitive  enough — I'm  a  cave 
person,  really — to  have  felt  that  having  a  girl,  at  least  before 
you  had  a  boy,  would  be  a  sort  of  disgrace.  Like  the  Hindoo 
women  in  Kipling.  But  don't  you  really  care?" 


168  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"Why,  the  queer  thing  is,"  said  Rose,  who  had  been  in  a 
daze  ever  since  Jane's  first  question,  "that  I  hadn't  thought 
of  it  as  anything  at  all  but — It.  Hardly  that,  really.  I've 
known  how  miserable  I've  been,  and  that  there  were  things  I 
must  be  careful  not  to  do, — and,  of  course,  what  was  going  to 
happen.  But  that  when  it  was  all  over  there'd  be  a  baby  left, 
— a — a  son  or  a  daughter,  why,  that's  .  .  ." 

Her  surprise  had  carried  her  into  a  confidence  that  her 
budding  friendship  for  Jane  was  hardly  ripe  for,  and  she 
pulled  up  rather  suddenly.  "I  didn't  know  you  had  any  chil 
dren,"  she  concluded,  by  way  of  avoiding  a  further  discussion 
of  the  marvel  just  then.  "Are  they  here  with  you  now?" 

Jane  explained  why  they  were  not.  They  weren't  babies 
any  more,  two  husky  little  boys  of  five  and  three,  and  they 
were  rejoicing  in  the  care  of  a  grandmother  and  a  highly 
competent  nurse.  "One  of  those  terribly  infallible  people, 
you  know.  Oh,  I  don't  like  it.  I  get  a  night  letter  every 
morning,  and,  of  course,  if  one  of  them  got  the  sniffles  I'd  be 
off  home  like  a  shot.  I'd  like  to  be  a  regular  domestic  mother ; 
not  let  another  soul  but  me  touch  them  (Jane  really  believed 
this)  but  you  see  we  can't  well  afford  it.  Barry  pays  me  five 
dollars  a  day  for  working  for  him.  I  scout  around  and  dig 
up  material  and  interview  people  for  him — I  used  to  be  a  re 
porter,  you  know.  He'd  have  to  hire  somebody,  and  it  might 
better  be  me  and  keep  the  money  in  the  family.  Because  the 
nurse  who  takes  my  place  doesn't  cost  near  so  much  as  that. 
All  the  same,  as  I  say,  I  don't  half  like  it.  You  can  preach 
the  new  stuff  till  you're  black  in  the  face,  but  there's  no  job 
for  a  woman  like  taking  care  of  her  own  children." 

Rose  listened  to  all  this,  as  well  as  to  Jane's  subsequent 
remarks,  with  only  so  much  attention  as  was  required  to  keep 
her  guest  from  suspecting  that  she  wasn't  really  listening  at 
all.  Jane  didn't  stay  long.  She  had  to  go  out  and  earn 
Barry's  five  dollars — she'd  lose  her  job  if  she  didn't,  so  she 
said,  and  Rose  was  presently  left  alone  to  dream,  actually  for 
the  first  time,  of  the  wonders  that  were  before  her. 

What  a  silly  little  idiot  she'd  been  not  to  have  seen  the 
thing  for  herself !  She'd  been,  all  the  while,  beating  her  head 


THE   DOOR   THAT   WAS   TO    OPEX          169 

against  blind  walls  when  there  was  a  door  there  waiting  to 
open  of  itself  when  the  time  came.  Motherhood !  There'd  be 
a  doctor  and  a  nurse  at  first,  of  course,  but  presently  they'd 
go  away  and  she'd  be  left  with  a  baby.  Her  own  baby !  She 
could  care  for  him  with  her  own  hands,  feed  him — her  joy 
reached  an  ecstasy  at  this — feed  him  from  her  own  breast. 

That  life  which  Eodney  led  apart  from  her,  the  life  into 
which  she  had  tried  with  such  ludicrous  unsuccess  to  effect 
an  entrance,  was  nothing  to  this  new  life  which  was  to  open 
before  her  in  a  few  short  months  now.  Meanwhile,  she  not 
only  must  wait;  she  could  well  afford  to. 

That  was  why  she  could  listen  with  that  untroubled  smile 
of  hers  to  the  terrible  things  that  Eodney  and  James  Ean- 
dolph  and  Barry  Lake  and  Jane  got  into  the  way  of  hurling 
across  her  dinner  table,  and  to  the  more  mildly  expressed  but 
equally  alkaline  cynicisms  of  Jimmy  Wallace. 

(Jimmy  was  dramatic  critic  on  one  of  the  evening  papers, 
as  well  as  a  bit  of  a  playwright.  He  was  a  slim,  cool,  smiling, 
highly  sophisticated  young  man,  who  renounced  all  privileges 
as  an  interpreter  of  life  in  favor  of  remaining  an  unbiased 
observer  of  it.  He  never  bothered  to  speculate  about  what 
you  ought  to  do; — he  waited  to  see  what  you  did.  He  knew, 
more  or  less,  everybody  in  the  world, — in  all  sorts  of  worlds. 
He  was,  for  instance,  a  great  friend  of  Violet  Williamson's 
and  Bella  Forrester's  and  was,  at  the  same  time,  on  terms  of 
avuncular  confidence  with  Dotty  Blott  of  the  Globe  chorus. 
And  he  was  exactly  the  same  man  to  the  three  of  them.  He 
fitted  admirably  in  with  their  new  circle.) 

Well,  in  the  light  of  the  miraculous  transformation  that 
lay  before  her  Eose  could  listen  undaunted  to  the  tough  phi- 
losophizings  her  husband  and  Barry  Lake  delighted  in  as  well 
as  to  the  mordant  merciless  realities  with  which  Doctor  Ean- 
dolph  and  Jimmy  Wallace  confirmed  them.  She  wasn't  in 
different  to  it  all.  She  listened  with  all  her  might. 

If  there  was  anything  in  prenatal  influence,  that  baby  of 
hers  was  going  to  be  intelligent ! 


CHAPTER  XI 

AN   ILLUSTRATION 

So  far  as  externals  went,  her  life,  that  spring,  was  im 
mensely  simplified.  The  social  demands  on  her,  which  had 
been  so  insistent  all  winter,  stopped  almost  automatically. 
The  only  exception  was  the  Junior  League  show  in  Easter 
week,  for  which  she  put  in  quite  a  lot  of  work.  She  was  to 
have  danced  in  it. 

This  is  an  annual  entertainment  by  which  Chicago  sets 
great  store.  All  the  smartest  and  best-looking  of  the  younger 
set  take  part  in  it,  in  costumes  that  would  do  credit  to  Mr. 
Ziegfeld,  and  as  much  of  Chicago  as  is  willing  and  able  to 
pay  five  dollars  a  seat  for  the  privilege  is  welcome  to  come 
and  look.  Delirious  weeks  are  spent  in  rehearsal,  under  a 
first-class  professional  director,  audience  and  performers  have 
an  equally  good  time,  and  Charity,  as  residuary  legatee,  prof 
its  by  thousands. 

Eose  dropped  in  at  a  rehearsal  one  day  at  the  end  of  a 
solid  two  hours  of  committee  work,  found  it  unexpectedly 
amusing,  and  made  a  point  thereafter  of  attending  when  she 
could.  Her  interest  was  heightened  if  not  wholly  actuated  by 
some  things  Jimmy  Wallace  had  been  telling  her  lately  about 
how  such  things  were  done  on  the  real  stage. 

He  had  written  a  musical  comedy  once,  lived  through  the 
production  of  it,  and  had  spent  a  hard-earned  two-weeks  va 
cation  trouping  with  it  on  the  road,  so  he  could  speak  with 
authority.  It  was  a  wonderful  Odyssey  when  you  could  get 
him  to  tell  it,  and  as  she  made  a  good  audience  she  got  the 
whole  thing — what  everybody  was  like,  from  the  director 
down,  how  the  principals  dug  themselves  in  and  fought  to  the 
last  trench  for  every  line  and  bit  of  business  in  their  parts, 
and  sapped  and  mined  ahead  to  get,  here  or  there,  a  bit  more; 
— how  insanely  hard  the  chorus  worked  .  .  . 

170 


AN   ILLUSTRATION  171 

The  thing  got  a  sociological  twist  eventually,  of  course, 
when  Jane  wanted  to  know  if  it  were  true,  as  alleged  by  a 
prominent  woman  writer  on  feminism,  that  the  chorus-girls 
were  driven  to  prostitution  by  inadequate  pay.  Jimmy  de 
molished  this  assertion  with  more  warmth  than  he  often 
showed.  He  didn't  know  any  other  sort  of  job  that  paid  a 
totally  untrained  girl  so  well.  There  were  initial  require 
ments,  of  course.  She  had  to  have  reasonably  presentable 
arms  and  legs  and  a  rudimentary  sense  of  rhythm.  But  it 
took  a  really  accomplished  stenographer,  for  instance,  to  earn 
as  much  a  week  as  was  paid  the  average  chorus-girl.  The 
trouble  was  that  the  indispensable  assets  in  the  business  were 
not  character  and  intelligence  and  ambition,  but  just  per 
sonal  charms. 

Eose  grinned  across  at  Eodney.  "That's  like  wives,  isn't 
it?"  she  observed. 

"And  then,"  Jimmy  went  on,  "the  work  isn't  really  hard 
enough,  except  during  rehearsals,  to  keep  them  out  of  mis 
chief."  Eose  smiled  again,  but  didn't  press  her  analogy  any 
further.  "But  a  girl  who's  serious  about  it,  who  doesn't  have 
to  be  told  the  same  thing  more  than  once,  and  catches  on, 
sometimes,  without  being  told  at  all, — why,  she  can  always 
have  a  job  and  she  can  be  as  independent  as  anybody.  She 
can  get  twenty-five  dollars  a  week  or  even  as  high  as  thirty. 
It's  surprising  though,"  he  concluded,  "considering  what  a 
bunch  of  morons  most  of  them  are,  that  they  work  as  well  as 
they  do;  turn  up  on  time  for  rehearsals  and  performances, 
even  when  they're  feeling  really  seedy,  stand  the  awful  bawl 
ing  out  they  get  every  few  minutes — because  some  directors 
are  downright  savages — and  keep  on  going  over  and  over  a 
thing  till  they're  simply  reeling  on  their  pins,  without  any 
fuss  at  all." 

"They  can  always  lose  their  job,"  said  Barry.  "There's 
great  merit  in  that." 

The  latter  part  of  this  conversation  was  what  she  was  to 
remember  afterward,  but  the  thing  which  impressed  Eose  at 
the  time,  and  that  held  her  for  hours  looking  on  at  the  League 
show  rehearsals,  was  what  Jimmy  had  told  her  about  the  tech- 


172  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

nical  side  of  the  work  of  production,  the  labors  of  the  di 
rector,  and  so  on. 

The  League  was  paying  their  director  three  hundred  dol 
lars  a  week,  and  by  the  end  of  the  third  rehearsal  Eose  de 
cided  that  he  earned  it.  The  change  he  could  make,  even  with 
one  afternoon's  work,  in  the  effectiveness,  the  carrying  power, 
of  a  dance  number  was  astonishing.  It  wasn't  at  all  a  ques 
tion  of  good  taste.  There  stood  Bertie  Willis  simply  awash 
with  good  taste  and  oozing  suggestions  whose  hopeless  futility 
was  demonstrated,  even  to  him,  the  moment  an  attempt  was 
made  to  put  them  into  effect.  The  director  was  concerned 
with  matters  of  fact.  There  were  ascertained  methods  of  get 
ting  a  certain  range  of  effects  and  he  knew  what  they  were 
and  applied  them — as  well  as  the  circumstances  admitted. 
He  was  working  under  difficulties,  poor  chap !  Eose,  enlight 
ened  by  Jimmy  Wallace,  could  see  that.  A  man  habituated 
to  bawling  at  a  girl,  wrhen  the  spirit  so  moATed  him,  "Here, 
you  Belmont !  What  do  you  think  you're  trying  to  do  ?  You 
try  sleeping  at  night  and  staying  awake  at  rehearsal.  See 
how  it  works !" — accustomed  to  the  liberty  of  saying  things 
like  that,  and  then  finding  himself  under  the  necessity  of 
swallowing  hard  and  counting  ten,  and  beginning  with  an — 
"I  think,  if  you  don't  mind  .  .  . !"  was  in  a  hard  case. 

Bertie  Willis  had  his  usefulness  here.  Sometimes  Eose 
heard  the  director  whisper  hoarsely,  "For  God's  sake,  don't 
let  her  do  that !  She  can't  do  that !"  and  then  Bertie  would 
intervene  and  accomplish  wonders  by  diplomacy. 

But  it  must  be  wonderfully  exhilarating,  Eose  thought,  to 
know  exactly  why  that  girl  was  ridiculous  and  what  to  do  to 
make  her  look  right.  And  to  be  able  to  sell  your  knowledge 
for  three  hundred  dollars  a  week.  This  was  the  sort  of  thing 
Rodney  did,  when  one  came  to  think  of  it.  She  wondered 
whether  he  could  sell  his  special  sort  of  knowledge  for  as 
much.  That  must  be  the  sort  of  possession  Simone  Greville 
had  had  in  mind  when  she  said  that  nothing  worth  having 
could  be  bought  cheap.  Neither  Rodney  nor  the  director  had 
found  his  specialty  growing  on  a  bush ! 

But  her  specialty,  which  in  her  life  was  to  fill  the  place  a 


AN    ILLUSTRATION  173 

knowledge  of  stage  dancing  filled  in  the  director's,  was  to 
come  in  a  different  way.  You  paid  a  price,  of  course,  for 
motherhood,  in  pain  and  peril,  but  it  remained  a  miraculous 
gift,  for  all  that. 


CHAPTER  XII 

WHAT   HARRIET   DID 

SHE  must  wait  for  her  miracle.  As  the  weeks  and  months 
wore  away,  and  as  the  season  of  violent  and  high-frequency 
alternations  between  summer  and  winter,  which  the  Chicagoan 
calls  spring,  gave  place  to  summer  itself,  Rose  was  driven  to 
intrench  herself  more  and  more  deeply  behind  this  great  ex 
pectation.  It  was  like  a  dam  holding  back  waters  that  other 
wise  would  have  rushed  down  upon  her  and  swept  her  away. 

The  problems  went  on  mounting  up  behind  the  dam,  of 
course.  All  the  minor  luxuries  of  their  way  of  living,  which 
had  been  so  keen  a  delight  to  her  during  the  first  unthinking 
months  of  their  married  life ;  all  the  sumptuous  little  elabora 
tions  of  existence  which  she  had  explored  with  such  adven 
turous  delight,  had  changed — now  that  she  knew  they  had 
been  bought  by  the  abridgment  of  her  husband's  freedom,  by 
the  invasion  of  the  clear  space  about  himself  which  he  had 
always  so  jealously  guarded — into  a  cloud  of  buzzing  sting 
ing  distractions. 

And  they  were  the  harder  to  bear  now  that  she  recognized 
how  hard  they  were  going  to  be  to  drive  away.  It  would  have 
to  be  effected  without  wounding  Rodney's  primitive  mascu 
line  pride — without  convicting  him  of  being  an  inadequate 
provider. 

The  baffling  tiling  about  him  was  that  he  had,  quite  uncon 
sciously  and  sincerely,  two  points  of  view.  His  affection  for 
her,  his  wife,  lover,  mistress,  was  a  lens  through  which  he 
sometimes  looked  out  on  the  world.  As  she  refracted  the  facts 
of  life  for  him  they  presented  themselves  in  the  primitive  old- 
fashioned  way. 

But  there  was  another  window  in  his  soul  through  which  he 
saw  life  with  no  refractions  whatever ;  remorselessly,  logically. 

174 


WHAT    HARRIET    DID  175 

Looking  through  the  window,  as  he  did  when  he  talked  to 
Barry  Lake,  or  James  Randolph,  he  saw  life  as  a  mass  of  un 
yielding  reciprocities.  You  got  what  you  paid  for.  You  paid 
for  what  you  got.  And  he  saw  both  men  and  women — though 
chiefly  women — tangling  and  nullifying  their  lives  in  futile 
efforts  to  evade  this  principle ;  looking  for  an  Eldorado  where 
something  was  to  be  had  for  nothing;  for  panaceas;  for  the 
soft  without  the  hard. 

He  was  perfectly  capable  of  seeing  and  describing  an  ab 
stract  wife  like  that  in  blistering  terms  that  would  make  an 
industrious  street-walker  look  almost  respectable  by  compari 
son.  But  when  he  looked  at  Rose,  he  saw  her  through  the 
lens,  as  some  one  to  be  loved  and  desired, — and  prevented,  if 
possible,  from  paying  anything. 

Somehow  or  other  those  two  views  must  be  reconciled  be 
fore  a  life  of  real  comradeship  between  them  was  possible; 
before  the  really  big  thing  she  had  promised  Portia  to  fight 
for  could  be  anything  more  than  a  tormenting  dream. 

Would  the  miracle  solve  this?  It  must.  It  was  the  only 
tiling  left  to  hope  for.  In  the  shelter  of  the  great  dam  she 
could  wait  serene. 

And  then  came  Harriet,  and  the  pressure  behind  the  dam 
rose  higher. 

Rose  had  tried,  rather  unsuccessfully,  to  realize,  when  dur 
ing  the  earlier  days  of  her  marriage  she  had  heard  Harriet 
talked  about,  that  there  was  actually  in  existence  another 
woman  who  occupied,  by  blood  anyway,  the  same  position  to 
ward  Rodney  and  herself  that  Frederica  did.  She  felt  almost 
like  a  real  sister  toward  Frederica.  But  without  quite  putting 
the  notion  into  words,  she  had  always  felt  it  was  just  as  well 
that  Harriet  was  an  Italian  contessa  four  thousand  miles 
away.  Rodney  and  Frederica  spoke  of  her  affectionately,  to 
be  sure,  but  their  references  made  a  picture  of  a  rather  for 
midably  correct,  seriously  aristocratic  sort  of  person.  Harriet 
had  always  had,  Rose  could  see,  a  very  effective  voice  in  the 
family  councils.  She  hadn't  much  of  a  mind,  perhaps;  Rod 
ney  described  it  once  as  a  small,  well  oiled,  easy  running  sort 
of  mind  that  stitched  away  without  misgivings,  to  its  con- 


176  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

elusions.  Rodney  never  could  have  been  very  fond  of  her. 
But  she  had  something  he  knew  he  lacked,  and  in  matters 
which  he  regarded  as  of  minor  importance — things  that  he 
didn't  consider  -worth  bothering  much  about  one  way  or  the 
other — he'd  submit  to  her  guidance,  it  appeared,  without 
much  question. 

She  had  written,  on  the  occasion  of  Rodney's  marriage,  a 
letter  to  Rose,  professing  with  perfect  adequacy,  to  give  her 
a  sisterly  welcome  into  the  family.  But  Rose  felt  pretty  sure 
(a  fragment  of  talk  she  overheard,  an  impatient  laugh  of 
Rodney's,  and  Frederica's  "Oh,  that's  Harriet  of  course,"  had 
perhaps  suggested  it)  that  the  contessa  regarded  Rodney's 
marriage  as  a  mesalliance.  She  had  entertained  this  notion 
the  more  easily  because  at  that  time  what  Harriet  thought — 
whatever  Harriet  might  think — seemed  a  matter  of  infinitesi 
mal  importance. 

She'd  discovered,  along  in  the  winter  sometime,  that  Har 
riet's  affairs  were  going  rather  badly.  Xeither  Rodney  noi 
Frederica  had  gone  into  details.  But  it  was  plain  enough  that 
both  of  them  were  looking  for  a  smash  of  some  sort.  It  was 
in  May  that  the  cable  came  to  Frederica  announcing  that 
Harriet  was  coming  back  for  a  long  visit.  "That's  all  she 
said,"  Rodney  explained  to  Rose.  "But  I  suppose  it  means 
the  finish.  She  said  she  didn't  want  any  fuss  made,  but  she 
hinted  she'd  like  to  have  Freddy  meet  her  in  Xew  York,  and 
Freddy's  going.  Poor  old  Harriet !  That's  rather  a  pill  for 
her  to  swallow,  if  it's  so.  We  must  try  to  cheer  her  up." 

She  didn't  seem  much  in  need  of  cheering  up,  Rose  thought, 
when  they  first  met.  All  that  showed  on  the  contessa' s  highly 
polished  surface  was  a  disposition  to  talk  humorously  over  old 
times  with  her  old  friends,  including  her  brother  and  sister, 
and  a  sort  of  dismayed  acquiescence  in  the  smoky  seriousness, 
the  inadequate  civilization,  the  sprawling  formlessness  of  the 
city  of  her  birth,  not  excluding  that  part  of  it  which  called  it 
self  society. 

In  broad  strokes,  you  could  describe  Harriet  by  saying  she 
was  as  different  as  a  beautiful  woman  could  be  from  Fred- 
erica.  She  wasn't  so  beautiful  as  Frederica,  to  be  sure,  but 


WHAT    HARRIET    DID  177 

together  they  made  a  wonderfully  contrasted  pair — Harriet 
almost  as  perfect  a  brunette  type  as  Frederica  was  a  blonde, 
and  got  up  with  her  ear-rings  and  her  hair  and  all  to  look 
rather  exotic.  Her  speech,  too,  and  the  cultivated  things  she 
could  do  with  her  shoulders,  carried  out  the  impression.  She 
had  a  trick — when  she  wanted  to  be  disagreeable  an  ill- 
natured  observer  would  have  said— of  making  remarks  in 
Italian  and  then  translating  them. 

She  wasn't  disagreeable  though — not  malicious  anyway, 
and  the  very  hard  finish  she  carried,  had  been  developed  prob 
ably  as  a  matter  of  protection.  She  must  have  been  through  a 
good  deal  in  the  last  few  years.  She'd  had  two  children  still 
born,  for  one  thing,  and  she  was  frankly  afraid  to  try  it  again. 
She  never  wanted  any  sympathy  from  anybody.  If  it  came 
down  to  that,  she'd  prefer  arsenic.  She  resisted  Rose's  rather 
poignant  charm,  as  she  resisted  any  other  appeal  to  her 
emotions.  With  the  charm  left  out,  Rose  was  simply  a  well 
meaning,  somewhat  insufficiently  civilized  young  person,  the 
beneficiary,  through  her  marriage  with  Rodney,  of  a  piece  of 
unmerited  good  fortune.  She  didn't  in  the  least  mean  to  be 
unkind  to  her,  however,  and  didn't  dream  that  she  was  giving 
Rose  an  inkling  how  she  thought  of  her. 

Her  manner  toward  this  new  member  of  the  family  was 
studiously  affectionate.  She  avoided  being  either  disagreeable 
or  patronizing.  Rose  could  see,  indeed,  how  carefully  she 
avoided  it.  She  knew,  too,  that  Frederica  saw  the  same  thing 
and  tried  to  compensate  for  it  by  a  little  extra  affectionate- 
ness.  She  even  thought — though  perhaps  this  was  mere  self- 
consciousness — that  she  detected  a  trace  of  the  same  thing  in 
Rodney. 

The  tie  of  blood  is  a  powerful  thing.  Rose  had  never  real 
ized  before  how  powerful.  With  Harriet's  arrival,  she  became 
aware  of  the  Aldrich  family  as  a  sodality — something  she 
didn't  belong  to  and  never  could.  It  was  quite  true,  as  Fred- 
erica  had  said,  that  she  and  Rodney  had  always  been  special 
pals.  Harriet  fitted  into  the  family  on  the  other  side  of  Fred- 
erica  from  her  brother.  She  was  a  person  with  a  good  deal 
of  what  one  calls  magnetism,  and  she  attracted  Frederica  to- 


178  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

ward  herself — made  her,  when  she  was  about,  a  somewhat  dif 
ferent  Frederica.  She  even  attracted  Eodney  a  little  in  the 
same  way. 

The  time  of  the  year  (it  was  after  the  end  of  the  social 
season)  made  it  natural  for  them  to  be  together  a  good  deal. 
And  of  course  Harriet's  return,  after  an  absence  of  years, 
made  them  seek  such  meetings.  The  result  was  that  Eose,  at 
the  end  of  almost  a  year  of  marriage,  got  her  first  real  taste 
of  lonesomeness.  When  the  four  of  them  were  together,  Eose 
felt  like  an  outsider  intruding  on  intimates.  They  didn't 
mean  her  to  feel  that  way — made  a  distinct  effort,  Eodney 
and  Erederica,  anyway,  to  prevent  her  feeling  that  way; 
which  of  course  only  pointed  it.  They  had  old  memories  to 
talk  about;  old  friendships.  They  had,  like  all  close  knit 
families,  a  sort  of  shorthand  language  to  talk  in.  If  Eose 
came  into  the  room  where  they  were,  she'd  often  be  made 
aware  that  the  current  subject  of  the  conversation  had  been 
dropped  and  a  new  one  was  getting  started;  or  else  there'd 
be  laborious  explanations. 

It  wouldn't  have  mattered — not  so  much  anyway,  if  Eose 
had  had  a  similar  sodality  of  her  own  to  fall  back  on — a  mass 
of  roots  extending  out  into  indigenous  soil.  But  Eose,  you 
see,  had  been  transplanted.  Her  two  brothers  were  hardly 
more  than  faint  memories  of  her  childhood.  One  was  a  high- 
school  principal  down  in  Pennsylvania;  the  other  a  professor 
of  history  at  one  of  the  western  state  universities.  Both  of 
them  had  married  young  and  had  been  very  much  married — 
on  small  incomes — ever  since.  The  only  family  she  had  that 
counted,  was  her  mother  and  Portia.  And  they  were  gone 
now  to  California. 

She  had  had  a  world  of  what  she  called  friends,  of  course, 
of  her  own  age,  at  the  high  school  and  at  the  university.  But 
her  popularity  in  those  circles,  her  easy  way  of  liking  every 
body,  and  her  energetic  preoccupation  with  things  to  do,  had 
prevented  any  of  these  friendships  from  biting  in  very  deep. 
None  of  them  had  been  solidly  founded  enough  to  withstand 
the  wavelike  rush  of  Eodney  Aldrich  into  her  life.  She  had 
gone  over  altogether  into  her  husband's  world.  The  world 


WHAT    HARRIET    DID  179 

that  had  been  her  own,  hadn't  much  more  existence,  except 
for  her  mother  and  sister  out  in  California,  than  the  memory 
of  a  dream. 

But  it  took  Harriet's  arrival  to  make  her  realize  this.  And 
the  realization,  when  it  was  pressed  home  particularly  hard, 
brought  with  it  moments  of  downright  panic.  Everything — • 
everything  she  had  in  the  world,  went  back  to  Rodney.  Ex 
cept  for  him,  she  was  living  in  an  absolute  vacuum.  What 
would  happen  if  the  stoutly  twisted  cable  that  bound  her  to 
him  should  be  broken,  as  the  cable  that  bound  Harriet  to  her 
husband  was,  apparently,  broken  ?  What  would  she  have  then 
of  which  she  could  say,  "This  much  is  mine"?  Well,  she'd 
have  the  child.  That  would  be,  partly  at  least,  hers. 

But  Harriet's  contribution  to  Rose's  difficulties,  to  the 
mounting  pressure  behind  the  dam,  was  destined  to  be  more 
serious — more  actual,  anyway — before  very  long. 

The  question  where  Rose  and  Rodney  were  going  to  live 
after  their  lease  on  the  McCrea  house  ended,  had  begun  to 
press  for  an  answer.  October  first  was  when  the  lease  expired 
and  it  wasn't  far  from  the  date  at  which  they  expected  the 
baby.  Rose  wouldn't  be  in  any  condition  for  house  hunting 
during  the  hot  summer  months.  Things  would  have  to  be 
settled  somehow  before  then.  A  heavy  calendar  of  important 
cases  had  kept  Rodney  from  giving  as  much  attention  to  the 
problem  as  he  himself  felt  it  needed.  He  had  delighted  Rose 
with  the  suggestion  that  they  go  out  into  the  country  some 
where.  Not  the  real  country  of  course,  but  up  along  the 
shore,  where  the  train  service  was  good  and  the  motor  a  possi 
ble  alternative. 

They  spent  some  very  lovely  afternoons  during  the  early 
days  of  the  emerging  spring,  cruising  about  looking  at  possi 
ble  places.  They  talked  of  building  at  first,  but  long  before 
they  could  make  up  their  minds  what  they  wanted  it  had  be 
come  too  late  for  that,  and  they  shifted  to  the  notion  of  buy 
ing  an  old  place  somewhere  and  remodeling  it.  One  reason 
why  they  made  no  more  progress  was  because  they  were  look 
ing  for  such  diiferent  things.  Rodney  wanted  acres.  He'd 
never  gardened  a  bit,  and  never  would ;  was  an  altogether  ur- 


180  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

ban  person,  despite  the  physical  energy  which  took  him 
pounding  off  on  long  country  walks.  But  when  he  heard  there 
was  a  tract  just  west  of  Martin  Whitney's,  up  at  Lake  Forest, 
that  could  be  had  at  a  bargain — thirty-five  thousand  dollars — 
he  let  his  eye  rove  over  it  appreciatively.  And  Frank  Craw 
ford  and  Howard  West  knew  of  advantageous  sites,  also,  on 
which  to  expatiate  with  convincing  enthusiasm.  The  kind  of 
house  you'd  have  to  build  on  that  sort  of  place  would  cost 
you  an  easy  thirty  thousand  more. 

Eose  didn't  even  yet  know  much  about  money,  to  be  sure, 
but  she  knew  enough  to  be  aghast  at  all  that.  What  she  tried 
to  make  Rodney  look  for  was  a  much  more  modest  establish 
ment — a  yard  big  enough  to  hold  a  tennis  court,  perhaps,  and 
a  house,  well,  that  could  be  added  to  as  they  needed  room. 

Xeither  of  them  stuck  very  close  to  the  main  point  on  these 
expeditions.  They  always  had  too  good  a  time  together — 
more  like  a  pair  of  children  on  a  picnic  than  serious  home- 
hunters,  and  they  frittered  a  good  deal  of  time  away  that 
they  couldn't  well  afford. 

This  was  the  situation  when  Harriet  took  a  hand  in  it.  It 
was  a  situation  made  to  order  for  Harriet  to  take  a  hand  in. 
She'd  sized  it  up  at  a  glance,  made  up  her  mind  in  three  min 
utes  what  was  the  sensible  thing  for  them  to  do,  written  a 
note  to  Florence  McCrea  in  Paris,  and  then  bided  her  oppor 
tunity  to  put  her  idea  into  effect.  She  went  out  cruising  with 
Rose  in  the  car  two  or  three  times,  looking  at  places,  but  gave 
her  no  indications  that  she  felt  more  than  the  most  languid 
interest  in  the  problem.  She  could  seem  less  interested  in  a 
thing  without  being  quite  impolite,  than  any  one  Rose  knew. 

When  she  got  Florence  McCrea's  answer  to  her  letter,  she 
took  the  first  occasion  to  get  Rodney  off  by  himself  and  talk 
a  little  common  sense  into  him. 

"What  about  where  to  live,  Rodney?"  she  asked.  "Made 
up  your  mind  about  it  yet?  I  suppose  you  know  how  many 
months  there  are  between  the  first  of  June  and  the  first  of 
October." 

"We  haven't  got  much  of  anywhere,"  he  admitted.  "We 
know  we  want  to  live  in  the  country,  that's  about  all," 


WHAT    HARRIET    DID  181 

"Out  in  the  country  just  as  winter's  getting  started?"  she 
asked.  "Settling  into  a  new  place — Rose  with  a  new  baby — 
everybody  else  back  in  town; — simply  no  chance  of  keeping 
servants  ?  Roddy,  old  man,  you're  entitled  to  be  a  babe  in  the 
woods,  of  course.  Any  man  is  who  does  the  kind  of  work  you 
do.  But  it  is  time  some  one  with  a  little  common  sense 
straightened  you  out  about  this." 

Harriet  couldn't  be  sure  from  the  length  of  time  he  took 
seeing  that  his  pipe  was  properly  alight,  whether  he  altogether 
liked  this  method  of  approach  or  not. 

"Common  sense  always  was  a  sort  of  specialty  of  yours,  sis," 
he  said  at  last,  "and  straightening  out.  You  were  always 
pretty  good  at  it."  Then,  out  of  a  cloud  of  his  own  smoke, 
"Fire  away." 

"Well,  in  the  first  place,"  she  said,  "remodeling  is  the 
slowest  work  in  the  world,  and  the  fussiest.  And  you  can't 
just  tell  an  architect,  with  a  wave  of  the  hand,  to  go  ahead. 
You  have  to  do  your  own  fussing,  which  would  drive  you 
cra/y.  If  you  had  your  house  to-day,  you'd  be  lucky  if  the 
paint  was  dry  and  the  thing  was  fit  to  move  into  by  the  first 
of  September.  And  next  September,  if  it's  blazing  hot,  won't 
be  exactly  the  time  for  Rose  to  go  ramping  around  trying  to 
buy  furniture  for  a  whole  establishment — because  you  haven't 
a  stick  yourselves,  of  course — and  getting  settled  in,  hiring 
servants,  getting  the  thing  going.  You  can't  be  sure  you'll 
have  till  the  first  of  October.  Things  like  that  don't  always 
happen  exactly  as  they  are  expected  to.  But  suppose  you  have 
good  luck  and  manage  it.  Then  where  are  you?  Out  in  the 
woods  somewhere  at  the  beginning  of  winter,  just  when  you 
ought  to  be  settled  comfortably  somewhere  in  town. 

"Oh,  I  know  it's  all  very  poetic,  sitting  in  front  of  a  roar 
ing  fire  of  logs,  while  the  wind  bangs  the  shutters,  and  that 
sort  of  thing,  Rose  singing  to  the  baby  and  all.  But  you're 
not  an  Arcadian  one  bit.  Neither  is  she,  really,  and  you'll 
simply  perish  out  there,  both  of  you,  and  be  back  in  town  be 
fore  the  holidays. 

"Rose  oughtn't  to  be  in  town  this  summer.  But  she'll  have 
to  be  to  put  this  through.  She  ought  to  be  down  at  York 


183  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

Harbor,  or  one  of  those  Cape  Cod  places,  instead  of  in  this 
horrible  smoky  hole.  Because  she's  not  so  very  fit,  really  do 
you  think?  Bit  moody,  I'd  say." 

"But  good  lord,  Harriet,  we've  got  to  get  out  of  here  any 
way,  in  October.  And  that  means  we've  got  to  have  some  sort 
of  place  to  get  into.  It  is  an  awkward  time,  I'll  admit." 

"ISTo,  you  haven't,"  she  said.  "You  can  stay  right  here  an 
other  six  months,  if  you  like.  I've  heard  from  Florence.  I 
met  her  in  Paris  in  April,  and  found  she  wasn't  a  bit  keen 
to  come  back  and  take  this  house  on.  Their  securities  have 
gone  down  again,  and  they're  feeling  hard-up.  Florence  has 
got  an  old  barn  of  an  atelier,  and  she's  puttering  around  in 
the  mud  thinking  she's  making  statuary.  Well,  when  I  found 
how  things  stood  here,  I  wrote  and  asked  her  if  she'd  lease 
for  six  months  more  if  she  got  the  chance,  and  she  wrote  back 
and  simply  grabbed  at  it.  All  you've  got  to  do  is  to  send 
her  a  five-word  cable  and  you're  fixed.  Then,  next  spring, 
when  your  troubles  are  over,  and  you  know  what  you  want, 
you  can  look  out  a  place  up  the  shore  and  have  the  summer 
there." 

Eodney  smoked  half-way  through  his  pipe  before  he  made 
any  comment  on  this  suggestion. 

"This  house  isn't  just  what  we  want,"  he  said.  "In  the 
first  place,  it's  damned  expensive." 

Harriet  shrugged  her  shoulders,  found  herself  a  cigarette 
and  lighted  it;  picked  up  one  of  Florence's  poetry  books  and 
eyed  the  heavily  tooled  binding  with  a  satirical  smile  before 
she  replied.  She  could  feel  him  looking  at  her,  and  she  knew 
he'd  wait  till  she  got  ready  to  go  on. 

"I'd  an  idea  there  was  that  in  it,"  she  said  at  last.  "Freddy 
said  something  .  .  .  Eose  had  been  talking  to  her."  Then 
after  another  little  silence,  and  with  a  sudden  access  of  ve 
hemence,  "You  don't  want  to  go  and  do  a  regular  fool  thing, 
Eoddy.  You're  getting  on  perfectly  splendidly.  You'll  be  at 
the  head  of  the  bar  out  here  in  ten  years,  if  you  keep  on. 
Frank  Crawford  was  telling  me  about  you  the  other  day. 
You've  settled  down,  and  we  thought  you  never  would.  It 
was  a  corking  move,  your  taking  this  house,  just  because  it 


WHAT    HAEEIET    DID  183 

made  you  settle  down.  You  can  earn  forty  thousand  dollars 
next  year,  just  with  your  practise,  if  you  want  to.  But  if  you 
pull  up  and  go  to  live  in  a  barn  somewhere,  and  stop  seeing 
anybody — people  that  count,  I  mean  .  .  ." 

Kodney  grunted.  "You're  beyond  your  depth,  sis,"  he  said. 
"Come  back  where  you  don't  have  to  swim.  The  expense  isn't 
a  capital  consideration,  I'll  admit  that.  Now  go  on  from 
there." 

"That's  like  old  times,"  she  observed  with  a  not  ill-humored 
grimace.  "I  wonder  if  you  talk  to  Eose  like  that.  Oh,  I  know 
the  house  is  rather  solemn  and  absurd.  It's  Florence  herself 
all  over,  that's  the  size  of  it,  and  I  suppose  you  are  getting 
pretty  well  fed  up  with  it.  But  what  does  that  matter  for  six 
months  more  ?  Heavens !  You  won't  know  where  you're  liv 
ing.  But  the  place  is  comfortable,  and  there's  room  in  it  for 
nurses  and  all  and  the  best  doctor  in  town  in  the  line  you'll 
want,  is  right  around  the  corner.  And,  as  I  say,  when  your 
troubles  are  over  and  you  know  what  you  want  .  .  ." 

He  pocketed  his  pipe  and  got  up  out  of  this  chair. 

"There's  something  in  it,"  he  admitted.  "I'll  think  it  over." 

"Better  cable  Florence  as  soon  as  you  can,"  she  advised. 
"She'll  want  to  know  .  .  ." 

Eose  protested  when  the  plan  for  living  six  months  more 
in  Florence  McCrea's  house  was  broached  to  her.  She  made 
the  best  fight  she  could.  But  Harriet's  arguments,  re-stated 
now  by  Eodney  with  full  conviction,  were  too  much  for  her. 
When  she  broke  down  and  cried,  as  she  couldn't  help  doing, 
Eodney  soothed  and  comforted  her,  assured  her  that  this  no 
tion  of  hers  about  the  expensiveness  of  it  all,  was  just  a  no 
tion — obsession  was  the  word  he  finally  came  to — which  she 
must  struggle  against  as  best  she  could.  She'd  see  things  in 
a  truer  proportion  afterward. 

Then  it  came  out  that  he  had  made  all  his  plans  for  a  long 
summer  vacation.  There  was  no  court  work  in  July  and  Au 
gust  anyway.  He  was  going  to  carry  her  off  to  a  quiet  little 
place  out  on  Cape  Cod  that  he  knew  about,  and  just  luxuriate 
in  her;  have  her  all  to  himself — not  a  soul  they  knew  about 
them.  They  would  lie  about  in  the  sands  all  day,  building 


184  THE    REAL   ADVENTUKE 

air  castles.  If  she  got  tired  of  him,  any  person  she  wanted 
to  see  should  be  telegraphed  for  forthwith.  The  one  thing 
she  had  to  bear  in  mind  was  that  she  was  to  be  happy  and  not 
bother  about  things ;  leave  everything  to  him. 

This  plan  was  carried  out,  and  in  a  paradise,  made  up  of 
blue  sea,  white  sands,  warm  sun  and  Eodney — Eodney  always 
there,  and  queerly  content  to  drowse  away  the  time  with  her, 
she  almost  forgot  the  great  dam  and  the  pressure  of  the 
waters  that  had  mounted  up  behind  it.  Was  it  an  obsession 
just  as  Eodney  said  ?  Would  she  find  when  it  was  all  over  and 
she  rallied  herself  for  the  great  endeavor,  that  there  was, 
after  all,  no  battle  to  be  fought — nothing  but  a  baby  at 
her  breast  ? 


CHAPTER  XIII 

FATE   PLAYS   A   JOKE 

TRAVELING  bars  flowing  along  parallel,  black  and  white ;  the 
white  ones  incandescent; — and  a  small  helpless  harried  thing 
struggling  to  keep  in  the  shadow  of  the  black  ones,  or  to 
regain  it  again  across  the  pitiless  zone  of  white  that  the 
little  helpless  thing  called  pain. — Traveling  bars  flowing  along 
endlessly. 

And  then  a  great  ball  whirling  in  planetary  space,  half 
dark,  half  incandescent  white,  having  for  its  sole  inhabitant, 
the  small  harried  thing  that  struggled  to  keep  in  the  dark 
out  of  the  glare  of  that  pitiless  white  pain. — One  watched  its 
struggles  from  a  long  way  off — like  God. — But  the  ball  whirled 
drunkenly  and  it  made  one  sick  to  look. — And  then  a  super 
vening  chaos — no  longer  a  ball  but  still  whirling,  reeling, 
tottering.  Eectangles  of  light,  which,  had  they  kept  still, 
would  have  been  windows — a  mirror. 

And  then,  very  fine  and  small  and  weak,  something  that 
knew  it  was  Eose  Stanton — Rose  Stanton  lying  in  a  bed  with 
people  about  her.  She  let  her  eyes  fall  heavily  shut  again 
lest  they  should  discover  she  was  there  and  want  her  to 
speak  or  think. 

The  bars  came  back,  but  the  whiteness  of  them  was  no 
longer  so  white,  and  slowly  they  faded  out.  Then,  for  a  long 
time,  nothing.  Then  sounds,  movements — soft,  skilful,  dis 
ciplined  sounds  and  movements.  And,  presently,  a  hand — 
a  firm  powerful  hand,  that  picked  up  and  supported  a  heavy 
limp  wrist — Rose  Stanton's  wrist — and  two  sensitive  finger 
tips  that  rested  lightly  on  the  upper  surface  of  it.  After  that, 
an  even  measured  voice — a  voice  of  authority,  whose  words 
no  doubt  made  sense,  only  Rose  was  too  tired  to  think  what 
the  sense  was : 

"She's  out  of  the  ether  now,  practically.  That's  a  splendid 

185 


186  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

pulse.  She's  doing  the  best  thing  she  can,  sleeping  like  that. 
It's  been  a  thoroughly  normal  delivery  from,  the  beginning. 
Oh,  a  long  difficult  one,  I'll  admit.  But  there's  nothing  now, 
that  you  could  want  better  than  what  you've  got." 

And  then  another  voice,  utterly  unlike  Rodney's  and  yet 
unmistakably  his — a  ragged  voice  that  tried  to  talk  in  a 
whisper  but  couldn't  manage  it;  broke  queer ly. 

"That's  all  right,"  it  said.  "But  I'll  find  it  easier  to  be 
lieve  when  .  .  ." 

She  must  see  him — must  know  what  it  meant  that  he  should 
talk  like  that.  With  a  strong  physical  effort,  she  opened  her 
eyes  and  tried  to  speak  his  name. 

She  couldn't;  but  some  one  must  have  been  watching  and 
seen,  because  a  woman's  voice  said  quickly  and  quietly,  "Mr. 
Aldrich." 

And  the  next  moment,  vast  and  towering,  and  very  blurred 
in  outline,  but,  like  his  voice,  unmistakable,  was  Rodney — • 
her  own  big  strong  Rodney.  She  tried  to  hold  her  arms  up 
to  him,  but  of  course  she  couldn't. 

And  then  he  shortened  suddenly.  He  had  knelt  down  be 
side  her  bed,  that  was  it.  And  she  felt  upon  her  palm,  the 
pressure  of  his  lips,  and  his  unshaven  cheek,  and  on  her 
wrist,  a  warm  wetness  that  must  be — tears. 

Why  was  he  crying  ?  What  had  happened  ?  She  must  try 
to  think. 

It  was  very  hard.  She  didn't  want  to  think,  but  she  must. 
She  must  begin  with  something  she  knew.  She  knew  who 
she  was.  She  was  Rose — Rodney's  Rose.  Here  was  his 
mouth  down  close  to  the  pillow  saying  her  name  over  and  over 
and  over  again.  And  she  was  in  her  own  bed.  But  what 
had  happened  ?  She  must  try  to  remember.  She  remembered 
something  she  had  said — said  to  herself  over  and  over  again 
an  illimitable  while  ago.  "It's  coming.  The  miracle's  be 
ginning."  What  had  she  meant  by  that  ? 

And  then  she  knew.  The  urgency  of  a  sudden,  terror  gave 
her  her  voice. 

"Roddy,"  she  said.  "There  was  going  to  be  a— baby. 
Isn't  there?" 


FATE    PLAYS   A   JOKE  187 

Something  queerly  like  a  laugh  broke  his  voice  when  he 
answered.  "Oh,  you  darling!  Yes.  It's  all  right.  That 
isn't  why  I'm  crying.  It's  just  because  I'm  so  happy." 

"But  the  baby !"  she  persisted.    "Why  isn't  it  here  ?" 

Rodney  turned  and  spoke  to  some  one  else.  "She  wants  to 
see/'  he  said.  "May  she  ?" 

And  then  a  woman's  voice  (why,  it  was  the  nurse,  of  course ! 
Miss  Harris,  who  had  come  last  night)  said  in  an  indulgent 
soothing  tone,  "Why,  surely  she  may.  Wait  just  a  minute." 

But  the  wait  seemed  hours.  Why  didn't  they  bring  the 
baby — her  baby?  There!  Miss  Harris  was  coming  at  last, 
with  a  queerly  bulky,  shapeless  bundle.  Eodney  stepped  in 
between  and  cut  off  the  view,  but  only  to  slide  an  arm  under 
mattress  and  pillow  and  raise  her  a  little  so  that  she  could  see. 

And  then,  under  her  eyes,  dark  red  and  hairy  against  the 
whiteness  of  the  pillow,  were  two  small  heads — two  small 
shapeless  masses  leading  away  from  them,  twitching,  squirm 
ing.  She  stared,  bewildered. 

"There  were  twins,  Rose,"  she  heard  Rodney  explaining 
triumphantly,  but  still  with  something  that  wasn't  quite  a 
laugh,  "a  boy  and  a  girl.  They're  perfectly  splendid.  One 
weighs  seven  pounds  and  the  other  six." 

Her  eyes  widened  and  she  looked  up  into  his  face  so  that 
the  pitiful  bewilderment  in  hers  was  revealed  to  him. 

"But  the  baby!"  she  said.  Her  wide  eyes  filled  with  tears 
and  her  voice  broke  weakly.  "I  wanted  a  baby." 

"You've  got  a  baby,"  he  insisted,  and  now  laughed  outright. 
"There  are  two  of  them.  Don't  you  understand,  dear  ?" 

Her  eyes  drooped  shut,  but  the  tears  came  welling  out 
along  her  lashes.  "Please  take  them  away,"  she  begged.  And 
then,  with  a  little  sob  she  whispered,  "I  wanted  a  baby,  not 
those." 

Rodney  started  to  speak,  but  some  sort  of  admonitory  signal 
from  the  nurse  silenced  him. 

The  nurse  went  away  with  her  bundle,  and  Rodney  stayed 
stroking  her  limp  hand. 

In  the  dark,  ever  so  much  later,  she  awoke,  stirred  a  little 
restlessly,  and  the  nurse,  from  her  cot,  came  quickly  and  stood 


188  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

beside  her  bed.  She  had  something  in  her  hands  for  Rose  to 
drink,  and  Rose  drank  it  dutifully. 

"Is  there  anything  else  ?"  the  nurse  asked. 

"I  just  want  to  know,"  Rose  said;  "have  I  been  dreaming, 
or  is  it  true  ?  Is  there  a  baby,  or  are  there  twins  ?" 

"Twins,  to  be  sure,"  said  the  nurse  cheerfully.  "The  loveli 
est,  liveliest  little  pair  you  ever  saw." 

"Thank  you,"  said  Rose.     "I  just  wanted  to  know." 

She  shut  her  eyes  and  pretended  to  go  to  sleep.  But  she 
didn't.  It  was  true  then.  Her  miracle,  it  seemed  somehow, 
had  gone  ludicrously  awry. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE   DAM   GIVES   WAY 

SHE  began  getting  her  strength  back  very  fast  after  tbe 
next  two  or  three  days,  but  this  queer  kink  in  her  emotions 
didn't  straighten  out.  She  came  to  see  that  it  was  absurd — 
monstrous  almost,  but  that  didn't  help.  Instead  of  a  baby,  she 
had  given  birth  to  two.  They  were  hers  of  course,  as  much 
as  one  would  have  been.  Only,  her  soul,  which  had  been 
waiting  so  ecstatically  for  its  miracle — for  the  child  which,  by 
making  her  a  mother,  should  supply  what  her  life  needed — 
her  soul  wouldn't — couldn't  accept  the  substitution.  Those 
two  droll,  thin  voiced,  squirming  little  mites  that  were  ex 
hibited  to  her  every  morning,  were  as  foreign  to  her,  as  de 
tached  from  her,  as  if  they  had  been  brought  into  the  house  in 
a  basket. 

There  was  a  certain  basis  of  reason  back  of  this.  At  some 
time,  during  those  early  hours  of  misty  half -consciousness,  it 
had  been  decided  that  two  children  would  be  too  much  for 
her  to  attempt  to  nurse. 

She  had  a  notion  that  this  idea  hadn't  originated  with 
the  doctor,  though  it  was  he  who  had  stated  it  to  her  with 
the  most  plausible  firmness.  Eodney  had  backed  the  doctor 
up,  firmly,  too.  Rose  was  only  a  girl  in  years — why,  just  a 
child  herself ;  hadn't  had  her  twenty-second  birthday  yet ;  the 
labor  had  been  long,  she  was  very  weak,  the  children  were  big 
and  vigorous,  and  she  couldn't  hope  to  supply  them  both  for 
more  than  a  very  few  weeks,  anyway.  And,  at  this  time  of 
year,  as  the  doctor  said,  there  was  no  difficulty  to  be  appre 
hended  from  bottle  feeding.  It  would  be  better  on  all 
accounts  .  . 

Still,  it  didn't  sound  exactly  like  Roddy's  idea  either. 

When  Harriet  came  in  for  the  first  time  to  see  her,  Rose 
knew.  Harriet  was  living  here  now,  running  the  house  for 

189 


190  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

Rodney,  while  Rose  was  laid  up.  Doing  it'  beautifully  well, 
too,  through  all  the  confusion  of  nurses  and  all.  Not  the 
slightest  jar  or  creak  of  their  complex  domestic  machinery 
ever  reached  Rose  in  the  big  chamber  where  she  lay.  Harriet 
said: 

"I  think  you're  in  great  luck  to  have  had  two  at  once ;  get 
your  duty  to  posterity  done  that  much  sooner.  And,  of 
course,  you  couldn't  possibly  be  expected  to  nurse  two  great 
creatures  like  that." 

Rose  acquiesced.  What  was  the  use  of  struggling  against 
so  formidable  a  unanimity  ?  She  would  have  struggled  though, 
she  knew,  but  for  that  queer  trick  Fate  had  played  her.  Her 
heart  ached,  as  did  her  breasts.  But  that  was  for  the  lips 
of  the  baby — the  baby  she  hadn't  had ! 

When  she  found  that  struggling  with  herself,  denouncing 
herself  for  a  brute,  didn't  serve  to  bring  up  the  feelings  to 
ward  the  twins  that  she  knew  any  proper  mother  ought  to 
have,  she  buried  the  dark  fact  as  deep  as  she  could,  and  pre 
tended.  It  was  only  before  Rodney  that  the  pretense  was 
necessary.  And  with  him,  really,  it  was  hardly  a  pretense  at 
all.  He  was  .such  a  child  himself,  in  his  gleeful  delight  over 
the  possession  of  a  son  and  a  daughter,  that  she  felt  for  him, 
tenderly,  mistily,  luminously,  the  very  emotion  she  was  trying 
to  capture  for  them — felt  like  cradling  his  head  in  her  weak 
arms,  kissing  him,  crying  over  him  a  little. 

She  wouldn't  have  been  allowed  to  do  that  to  the  babies 
anyway.  They  were  going  to  be  terribly  well  brought  up, 
those  twins;  that  was  apparent  from  the  beginning.  They 
had  two  nurses  all  to  themselves,  quite  apart  from  Miss  Harris, 
who  looked  after  Rose:  one  uncannily  infallible  person, 
omniscient  in  baby  lore — thoroughgoing,  logical,  efficient,  re 
morseless  as  a  German  staff  officer;  and  a  bright-eyed,  snub- 
nosed,  smart  little  maid,  for  an  assistant,  who  boiled  bottles, 
washed  clothes,  and,  at  certain  stated  hours,  over  a  previously 
determined  route,  at  a  given  number  of  miles  per  hour, 
wheeled  the  twins  out,  in  a  duplex  perambulator,  which  Har 
riet  had  acquired  as  soon  as  the  need  for  it  had  become  evi 
dent. 


THE   DAM    GIVES   WAY  191 

Miss  Harris  was  to  go  away  to  another  case  at  the  end  of 
the  month.  But  Mrs.  Ruston  (she  was  the  staff  officer)  and 
Doris,  the  maid,  were  destined,  it  appeared,  to  be  as  per 
manent  as  the  babies.  But  Rose  had  the  germ  of  an  idea  of 
her  own  about  that. 

They  got  them  named  with  very  little  difficulty.  The  boy 
was  Rodney,  of  course,  after  his  father  and  grandfather  be 
fore  him.  Rose  was  a  little  afraid  Rodney  would  want  the 
girl  named  after  her,  and  was  relieved  to  find  he  didn't. 
There'd  never  in  the  world  be  but  one  Rose  for  him,  he  said. 
So  Rose  named  the  girl  Portia. 

They  kept  Rose  in.  bed  for  three  weeks ;  flat  on  her  back  as 
much  as  possible,  which  was  terribly  irksome  to  her,  since  her 
strength  and  vitality  were  coming  back  so  fast.  The  irksome- 
ness  was  added  to  by  a  horrible  harness  largely  of  whalebone. 
Rase  got  the  notion,  too,  that  the  purpose  of  all  this  was  not 
quite  wholly  hygienic.  Harriet  had  said  once:  "You  know 
(he  most  distinguished  thing  about  you,  Rose,  dear — about 
your  looks,  I  mean — is  that  lovely  boyish  line  of  yours.  It  will 
be  a  perfect  crime  if  you  let  yourself  spread  out." 

This  wasn't  the  sort  of  consideration  to  make  the  inactivity 
any  easier  to  endure.  She  might  have  rebelled,  had  it  not 
been  for  that  germinant  idea  of  hers.  It  wouldn't  do,  she 
saw,  in  the  light  of  that,  to  give  them  any  excuse  for  calling 
her  unreasonable. 

At  the  end  of  this  purgatorial  three  weeks,  she  was  carried 
to  a  chair  and  allowed  to  sit  up  a  little,  and  by  the  end  of 
another,  to  walk  about — just  a  few  steps  at  a  time  of  course. 
One  Sunday  morning,  Rodney  carried  her  up-stairs  to  the 
nursery  to  see  her  babies  bathed.  This  was  a  big  room  at  the 
top  of  the  house  which  Florence  McCrea  had  always  vaguely 
intended  to  make  into  a  studio.  But,  in  a  paralysis  of  in 
decision  as  to  what  sort  of  studio  to  make  it  (book-binding, 
pottery  and  art  weaving  called  her  about  equally)  she  had 
left  the  thing  bare. 

Rodney  had  given  Harriet  carte  blanche  to  go  ahead  and 
fit  it  up  before  he  and  Rose  came  back  from  the  seashore,  and 
the  layette  was  a  monument  to  Harriet's  thoroughgoing  prac- 


192  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

ticality.  There  had  been  a  wild  day  of  supplementing  of 
course,  when  it  was  discovered  that  there  were  two  babies 
instead  of  one. 

The  room,  when  they  escorted  Rose  into  it,  was  a  terribly 
impressive  place.  The  spirit  of  a  barren  sterile  efficiency 
brooded  everywhere.  And  this  appearance  of  barrenness  ob 
tained  despite  the  presence  of  an  enormous  number  of  articles ; 
a  pair  of  scales,  a  perfect  battery  of  electric  heaters  of  various 
sorts;  rows  of  vacuum  jars  for  keeping  things  cold  or  hot; 
a  small  sterilizing  oven ;  instruments  and  appliances  that  Rose 
couldn't  guess  the  uses  or  the  names  of.  Mrs.  Ruston,  of 
course,  was  master  of  them  all,  and  Doris  flew  about  to  do 
her  bidding,  under  a  watchful  and  slightly  suspicious  eye. 
(Doris  was  the  sort  of  looking  girl  who  might  be  suspected  of 
kissing  a  tiny  pink  hand  when  no  one  was  looking. ) 

Rose  surveyed  this  scene,  just  as  she  would  have  surveyed  a 
laboratory,  or  a  factory  where  they  make  something  compli 
cated,  like  watches.  That's  what  it  was,  really.  Those  two 
pink  little  objects,  in  their  two  severely  sanitary  baskets, 
were  factory  products.  At  precise  and  unalterable  intervals, 
a  highly  scientific  compound  of  fats  and  proteids  was  put  into 
them.  They  were  inspected,  weighed,  submitted  to  a  routine 
of  other  processes.  And  in  all  the  routine,  there  was  nothing 
that  their  mother,  now  they  were  fairly  born,  was  wanted  for. 
Indispensable  to  a  certain  point,  no  doubt.  But  after  that 
rather  the  other  way  about — an  obstacle  to  the  routine  instead 
of  a  part  of  it. 

Rose  kept  these  ideas  to  herself  and  kept  her  eye  on  young 
Doris;  listened  to  the  orders  she  got;  and  studied  alertly 
what  she  did  in  the  execution  of  them. 

Rodney  had  a  lovely  time  watching  the  twins  bathed.  He 
stood  about  in  everybody's  way,  made  what  he  conceived  to 
be  alluring  noises,  in  the  perfectly  unsuccessful  attempt  to 
attract  the  infants'  attention,  and  finally,  when  the  various 
processes  were  complete,  on  schedule,  like  a  limited  train,  and 
the  thermometrically  correct  bottles  of  food  were  ready,  one 
for  each  baby,  he  turned  suddenly  to  his  wife  and  said :  "Don't 
you  want  to — hold  them,  Rose  ?"  She'd  have  held  a  couple  of 


THE   DAM    GIVES    WAY  193 

glowing  brands  in  her  arms  for  him,  the  way  he  had  looked 
and  the  way  he  had  said  it. 

A  stab  of  pain  went  through  her  and  tears  came  up  into 
her  eyes.  "Yes,  give  them  to  me,"  she  started  to  say. 

But  Mrs.  Euston  spoke  before  she  could  frame  the  words. 
It  was  their  feeding  hour,  she  pointed  out ;  a  bad  time  for  them 
to  be  excited,  and  the  bottles  were  heated  exactly  right. 

By  that  time  Eose's  idea  had  flowered  into  resolution.  She 
knew  exactly  what  she  was  going  to  do.  But  she  mustn't 
jeopardize  the  success  of  her  plan  by  trying  to  put  it  into 
effect  too  soon. 

She  waited  patiently,  reasonably,  for  another  fortnight. 
Harriet  by  that  time  had  gone  off  to  Washington  on  a  visit, 
taking  Eodney's  heartfelt  thanks  with  her.  Eose  expressed 
hers  just  as  warmly,  and  felt  ashamed  that  they  were  so 
unreal.  She  simply  mustn't  let  herself  get  to  resenting  Har 
riet  !  At  the  end  of  the  fortnight,  the  doctor  made  his  final 
visit.  Eose  had  especially  asked  Eodney  to  be  on  hand  to 
hear  his  report  when  the  examination  was  over.  Eose  and  the 
doctor  found  him  waiting  in  the  library. 

"He  says,"  Eose  told  her  husband,  "that  Pm  perfectly 
well."  She  turned  to  the  doctor  for  confirmation,  "Don't 
you?" 

The  doctor  smiled.  "As  far  as  my  diagnostic  resources  go, 
Mrs.  Aldrich,  you  are  perfectly  well." 

Eodney  was  pleased  of  course,  and  expressed  this  feeling 
fervently.  But  he  looked  across  at  his  glowing  radiant  wife, 
with  a  touch  of  misgiving. 

"What  are  you  trying  to  put  over  on  me  ?"  he  asked. 

"Not  a  thing,"  said  Eose  demurely.  "I  thought  you'd  be 
glad  to  know  that  I  needn't  be  kept  in  cotton-wool  any  more, 
and  that  you'd  feel  surer  of  it  if  he  told  you." 

"I  feel  surer  that  you've  got  something  up  your  sleeve,"  he 
said.  And,  to  the  doctor:  "I  don't  imagine  that  in  saying  my 
wife  is  perfectly  well,  you  mean  to  suggest  an  absence  of  all 
reasonable  caution." 

The  doctor  took  the  hint,  expatiated  largely;  it  was  always 
well  to  be  careful — one  couldn't,  in  fact,  be  too  careful.  The 


194  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

human  body  at  best,  more  especially  the — ah — feminine  human 
body,  was  a  delicate  machine,  not  to  be  abused  without  invit 
ing  serious  consequences.  He  was  even  a  little  reproachful 
about  it. 

"But  there's  no  more  reason,  is  there,"  Rose  persisted,  "why 
I  should  be  careful  than  why  any  other  woman  should — my 
nurse-maid  for  example?  Is  she  any  healthier  than  I  am?" 

It  was  indiscreet  of  the  doctor  to  look  at  her  before  he 
answered.  Her  eyes  were  sparkling1,  the  color  bright  in  her 
cheeks;  unconsciously,  she  had  flattened  her  shoulders  back 
and  drawn  a  good  deep  breath  down  into  her  lungs.  The  doc 
tor  smiled  a  smile  of  surrender  and  turned  back  to  Rodney. 
"I'll  confess,"  he  said,  "that  in  my  experience,  Mrs.  Aldrich 
is  almost  a  lusus  naturae — a  perfectly  sound,  healthy  woman." 

Rose  smiled  widely  and  contentedly  on  the  pair  of  them. 
"That's  more  like  it,"  she  said  to  the  doctor.  "Thanks  very 
much." 

But  after  he  had  gone,  she  did  not  spring  anything  on 
Rodney,  as  he  fully  expected  she  would.  She  took  him  out 
for  a  tramp  through  the  park  in  the  dusk  of  a  perfect  autumn 
afternoon,  and  went  to  a  musical  show  with  him  in  the  eve 
ning.  She  might  have  been,  as  far  as  he  could  see,  the  Rose 
of  a  year  ago.  She  had  the  same  lithe  boyish  swing.  She 
even  wore,  though  he  didn't  know  it,  the  same  skirt  for  their 
walk  in  the  park  that  she  had  worn  on  some  of  their  tramps 
before  they  were  married.  And  when  they  had  had  their 
evening  at  the  theater,  and  a  bite  of  supper  somewhere,  and 
come  home,  she  let  him  drop  off  to  sleep  without  a  word  that 
would  explain  her  insistence  on  getting  a  clean  bill  of  health 
from  the  doctor. 

But  the  next  morning,  while  Doris  was  busy  in  the  laundry, 
she  found  Mrs.  Ruston  in  the  nursery  and  had  a  talk  with 
that  lady,  which  was  destined  to  produce  seismic  upheavals. 

"I've  decided  to  make  a  little  change  in  our  arrangements, 
Mrs.  Ruston,"  she  said.  "But  I  don't  think  ifs  one  that  will 
disturb  you  very  much.  I'm  going  to  let  Doris  go — I'll  get 
her  another  place,  of  course — and  do  her  work  myself." 


THE    DAM    GIVES    WAY  195 

Mrs.  Huston  compressed  her  lips,  and  went  on  for  a  minute 
with  what  she  was  doing  to  one  of  the  twins,  as  if  she  hadn't 
heard. 

''Doris  is  quite  satisfactory,  madam,"  she  said  at  last.  "I'd 
not  advise  making  a  change.  She's  a  dependable  young 
woman,  as  such  go.  Of  course  I  watch  her  very  close." 

"I  think  I  can  promise  to  be  dependable,"  Rose  said.  "I 
don't  know  much  about  babies,  of  course,  but  I  think  I  can 
learn  as  well  as  Doris.  Anyhow,  I  can  wheel  them  about  and 
wash  their  clothes  and  boil  bottles  and  things  as  well  as  she 
does.  For  the  rest,  you  can  tell  me  what  to  do  just  as  you 
tell  her." 

Mrs.  Ruston  took  a  considerably  longer  interval  to  digest 
this  reply.  "Then  you're  meaning  to  give  the  girl  her  notice 
at  once,  madam  ?"  she  asked. 

"I'm  not  going  to  give  her  notice  at  all,"  said  Rose.  "I'm 
going  to  find  her  another  place.  I  shan't  have  any  trouble 
about  it  though.  As  you  say,  she's  a  very  good  nurse-maid, 
and  she's  a  pleasant  sort  of  a  human  being  besides.  But  as 
soon  as  I  can  find  her  another  place,  I'm  going  to  take  over 
her  work." 

To  this  last  observation  it  became  evident  that  Mrs.  Ruston 
meant  to  make  no  reply  at  all.  She  gave  Rose  some  statis 
tical  information  about  the  twins  instead,  in  which  Rose 
showed  herself  politely  interested  and  presently  withdrew. 

It  soon  appeared,  however,  that  though  Mrs.  Ruston  might 
be  slow  and  sparing  of  speech,  she  was  capable  of  acting  with 
a  positively  Napoleonic  dash.  Rodney  wore  a  queer  expres 
sion  all  through  dinner,  and  when  he  got  Rose  alone  in  the 
library  afterward,  he  explained  it.  Mrs.  Ruston  had  made 
her  two-hour  constitutional  that  afternoon  into  an  opportunity 
for  calling  on  him  at  his  office.  She  had  given  him  notice, 
contingently.  She  made  it  an  inviolable  rule  of  conduct,  it 
appeared,  never  to  undertake  the  care  of  two  infants  without 
the  assistance  of  a  nurse-maid.  She  was  a  conscientious 
person  and  she  felt  she  couldn't  do  justice  to  her  work  on 
any  other  basis.  Rose  had  informed  her  of  her  intention  to 


196  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

dispense  with  the  services  of  the  nurse-maid,  without  engaging 
any  one  else  to  take  her  place.  If  Eose  adhered  to  this  inten 
tion,  Mrs.  Ruston  must  leave. 

It  was  some  sort  of  absurd  misunderstanding,  of  course, 
Rodney  concluded  and  wanted  to  know  what  it  was  all  about. 

"I  did  say  I  meant  to  let  Doris  go,"  Rose  explained,  "but 
I  told  her  I  meant  to  take  Doris'  job  myself.  I  said  I  thought 
I  could  be  just  as  good  a  nurse-maid  as  she  was.  I  said  I'd 
boil  bottles  and  wash  clothes  and  take  Mrs.  Ruston's  orders 
exactly  as  if  I  were  being  paid  six  dollars  a  week  and  board 
for  doing  it.  And  I  meant  it  just  as  literally  as  I  said  it." 

He  was  prowling  about  the  room  in  a  worried  sort  of  way, 
before  she  got  as  far  as  that. 

"I  don't  see,  child/'  he  exclaimed,  "why  you  couldn't  leave 
well  enough  alone !  If  it's  that  old  economy  bug  of  yours 
again,  it's  nonsense.  You'd  save,  including  board,  about  ten 
dollars  a  week.  And  it  would  work  out  one  of  two  ways :  If 
you  didn't  do  all  the  maid's  work,  Mrs.  Ruston  would  have 
a  real  grievance.  She's  right  about  needing  all  the  help  she 
gets.  If  you  did  do  it,  it  would  mean  that  you'd  work  your 
self  sick. — Oh,  I  know  what  the  doctor  said,  but  that's  all 
rot,  and  he  knew  it.  You  had  him  hypnotized.  You'd  have 
to  give  up  everything  for  it — all  your  social  duties,  all  our 
larks  together.  Oh,  it's  absurd!  You,  to  spend  all  your 
time  doing  menial  work — scrubbing  and  washing  bottles,  to 
save  me  ten  dollars  a  week !" 

"It  isn't  menial  work,"  Rose  insisted.  "It's — apprentice 
work.  After  I've  been  at  it  six  months,  learning  as  fast 
as  I  can,  I'll  be  able  to  let  Mrs.  Ruston  go  and  take  her  job. 
I'll  be  really  competent  to  take  care  of  my  own  children.  I 
don't  pretend  I  am  now/' 

"I  don't  see  why  you  can't  do  that  as  things  are  now. 
She'll  let  you  practise  bathing  them  and  things  like  that,  and 
certainly  no  one  would  object  to  your  wheeling  them  out  in 
the  pram.  But  the  nurse-maid  would  be  on  hand  in 
case  .  .  ." 

"I'm  to  take  it  on  then,"  said  Rose,  and  her  voice  had  a  new 
ring  in  it — the  ring  of  scornful  anger — "I'm  to  take  it  on 


THE    DAM    GIVES   WAY  197 

as  a  sort  of  polite  sentimental  amusement.  I'm  not  to  do  any 
real  work  for  them  that  depends  on  me  to  get  done.  I'm 
not  to  be  able  to  feel  that,  even  in  a  bottle-washing  sort  of  way, 
I'm  doing  an  indispensable  service  for  them.  They're  not  to 
need  me  for  anything,  the  poor  little  mites !  They're  to  be 
something  for  me  to  have  a  sort  of  emotional  splurge  with, 
just  as" — she  laughed  raggedly — "just  as  some  of  the  wives 
you're  so  fond  of  talking  about,  are  to  their  husbands." 

He  stared  at  her  in  perfectly  honest  bewilderment.  He'd 
never  seen  her  like  this  before. 

"You're  talking  rather  wild  I  think,  Eose,"  he  said  very 
quietly. 

"I'm  talking  what  I've  learned  from  you,"  she  said,  but  she 
did  get  her  voice  in  control  again.  "You've  taught  me  the 
difference  between  real  work,  and  the  painless  imitation  of  it 
that  a  lot  of  us  women  spend  our  lives  on — between  doing 
something  because  it's  got  to  be  done  and  is  up  to  you,  and 
—finding  something  to  do  to  spend  the  time. 

"Oh,  Eodney,  please  try  to  forget  that  I'm  your  wife  and 
that  you're  in  love  with  me.  Can't  you  just  say :  'Here's  A, 
or  B,  or  X,  a  perfectly  healthy  woman,  twenty-two  years  old, 
and  a  little  real  work  would  be  good  for  her'  ?" 

She  won,  with  much  pleading,  a  sort  of  troubled  half-assent 
from  him.  The  matter  might  be  borne  in  mind.  It  could  be 
taken  up  again  with  Mrs.  Rustoru 

But  Mrs.  Huston  was  adamant.  Under  no  conceivable  cir 
cumstances  could  she  consent  to  regard  her  employer's  wife  as 
a  substitute  for  her  own  hired  assistant.  There  were  other 
nurses  though,  to  be  got.  Somewhere  one  could  be  found, 
no  doubt,  who'd  take  a  broader  view. 

Given  a  fair  field,  Rose  might  have  won  a  victory  here. 
But,  as  Portia  had  said  once,  the  pattern  was  cut  differently. 
There  was  a  sudden  alarm  one  night,  when  her  little  name 
sake  was  found  strangling  with  the  croup.  There  were  seven 
terrifying  hours — almost  unendurable  hours,  while  the  young 
life  swung  and  balanced  over  the  ultimate  abyss.  The  heroine 
of  those  hours  was  Mrs.  Euston.  It  was  her  watchfulness  that 
had  been  accessible  to  the  first  alarm — her  instant  doing  of 


198  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

the  one  right  thing  that  stemmed  the  first  onrush.  That  the 
child  lived  was  clearly  creditable  to  her. 

Rose  made  another  effort  even  after  that,  though  she  knew 
she  was  beaten  in  advance.  She  waited  until  the  storm  had 
subsided,  until  the  old  calm  routine  was  reestablished.  Then, 
once  more,  she  asked  for  her  chance. 

But  Rodney  exploded  before  she  got  the  words  fairly  out 
of  her  mouth. 

"No"  he  shouted,  "I  won't  consider  it !  She's  saved  that 
baby's  life.  Another  woman  might  have,  but  it's  more  likely 
not.  You'll  have  to  find  some  way  of  satisfying  your  whims 
that  won't  jeopardize  those  babies'  lives.  After  that  night — 
good  God,  Rose,  have  you  forgotten  that  night? — I'm  going 
to  play  it  safe." 

Rose  paled  a  little  and  sat  ivory  still  in  her  chair.  There 
were  no  miracles  any  more.  The  great  dam  was  swept  away. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   ONLY   REMEDY 

THE  sudden  flaw  of  passion  that  had  troubled  the  waters  of 
Rodney's  soul,  subsided,  spent  itself  in  mutterings,  explana 
tions,  tending  to  become  at  last  rather  apologetic.  He  said 
he  didn't  know  why  her  request  had  got  him  like  that.  It  had 
seemed  to  him  for  a  moment  as  if  she  didn't  realize  what  the 
children's  lives  meant  to  them — almost  as  if  she  didn't  love 
them.  He  knew  that  was  absurd,  of  course. 

Her  own  rather  monstrous  comments  on  these  observations 
had  luckily  remained  unspoken.  What  if  she  did  lose  a  child 
as  a  result  of  her  effort  to  care  for  it  herself?  She  could  bear 
more  children.  And  what  chance  had  she  to  love  them? 
Where  was  the  soil  for  love  to  take  root  in,  unless  she  took 
care  of  them  herself?  These  weren't  really  thoughts  of  hers 
— just  a  sort  of  crooked  reflection  of  what  he  was  saying  off 
the  surface  of  a  mind  terribly  preoccupied  with  something  else. 

She  was  in  the  grip  of  an  appalling  realization.  This 
moment — this  actually  present  moment  that  was  going  to 
last  only  until  she  should  speak  for  the  next  time,  or  move 
her  eyes  around  to  his  face — was  the  critical  moment  of  her 
life.  She  had,  for  just  this  moment,  a  choice  of  two  things 
to  say  when  next  she  should  speak — a  choice  of  two  ways  of 
looking  into  his  face.  A  mountaineer,  standing  on  the  edge 
of  a  crevasse,  deciding  whether  to  try  to  leap  across  and  win 
a  precarious  way  to  the  summit,  or  to  turn  back  and  confess 
the  climb  has  been  in  vain,  is  confronted  by  a  choice  like  that. 
If  ever  the  leap  was  to  be  made,  it  must  be  made  now.  The 
rainbow  bridge  across  the  crevasse,  the  miracle  of  motherhood, 
had  faded  like  the  mist  it  was  composed  of. 

She  was  a  mother  now.  Yet  her  relation  to  her  husband's 
life  was  the  same  as  that  of  the  girl  who  had  gone  to  his  office 

199 


200  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

the  night  of  the  Randolphs'  dinner.  And  no  external  event — 
nothing  that  could  happen  to  her  (remember  that  even  mother 
hood  had  "happened"  in  her  case)  could  ever  transmute  that 
relation  into  the  thing  she  wanted.  If  the  alchemy  were  to  be 
wrought  at  all,  it  would  be  by  the  act  of  her  own  will — at  the 
cost  of  a  deliberately  assumed  struggle.  There  was  nothing, 
any  more,  to  hope  from  waiting.  The  thing  that  whispered, 
"Wait!  To-morrow — some  to-morrow  or  other,  it  may  be 
easier !  Wait  until,  for  yourself,  you've  thought  out  the  con 
sequences," — that  was  the  voice  of  cowardice.  If  she  turned 
back,  down  the  easier  path,  to-night,  it  must  be  under  no 
delusion  that  she'd  ever  try  to  climb  again,  or  find  a  pair  of 
magic  wings  that  would  carry  her,  effortless,  to  what  she 
wanted. 

Well,  then,  she  had  her  choice.  One  of  two  things  she 
might  do  now.  It  was  in  her  power  to  look  up  at  him  and 
smile,  and  say :  "All  right,  Roddy,  old  man,  I'll  stop  being 
disagreeable.  I  won't  have  any  more  whims."  And  she 
could  go  to  him  and  clasp  her  hands  behind  his  head  and 
feel  the  rough  pressure  of  his  cheeks  against  the  velvety  sur 
faces  of  her  forearms,  and  kiss  his  eyes  and  mouth;  surrender 
to  the  embrace  she  knew  so  well  would  follow. 

She  could  make,  after  a  fashion,  a  life  of  that.  She  had  no 
fear  but  it  would  last.  Barring  incalculable  misfortunes,  she 
ought  to  be  able  to  keep  her  looks  and  her  charm  for  him, 
unimpaired,  or  but  little  impaired,  for  twenty  years — twenty- 
five,  with  care.  Por  the  rich,  the  resources  of  modern  civiliza 
tion  would  almost  guarantee  that.  Well,  twenty-five  years 
would  see  Rodney  through  his  fifties.  She  needn't,  barring 
accident,  have  any  more  children.  He'd  probably  be  con 
tent  with  two ;  especially  as  they  were  boy  and  girl. 

The  other  man  in  him — the  man  who  wasn't  her  lover — • 
would  struggle  of  course.  Except  when  she  was  by,  the  lover 
would  probably  have  a  bad  time  of  it.  She'd  have  to  find 
some  amusing  sort  of  occupation  to  enable  her  to  forget  that. 
But  when  she  was  there,  it  would  be  strange  if  she  and  her 
lover  together  couldn't,  most  of  the  time,  keep  the  other  man 
locked  up  where  he  wouldn't  disturb  them  much. 


THE    ONLY    REMEDY  201 

Lived  without  remorse  or  misgivings,  played  magnificently 
for  all  it  was  worth,  as  she  could  play  it— she  knew  that  now 
— it  would  be  a  rather  wonderful  life.  They  must  be  decidedly 
an  exceptional  pair  of  lovers,  she  thought.  Certainly  Madame 
Greville's  generalization  about  Americans  did  not  apply  to 
them,  and  she  was  coming  to  suspect  it  did  apply  to  the 
majority  of  her  friends.  She  could  have  that  life — safely, 
surely,  as  far  as  our  poor  mortality  can  be  sure  of  anything. 
She  had  only  to  reach  out  her  hands. 

But  if,  instead,  she  took  the  leap     .     .     . ! 

"Roddy     .     .     ."  she  said. 

He  was  slumped  down  in  a  big  easy  chair  at  the  other  side 
of  the  table,  swinging  a  restless  foot;  drumming  now  and 
then  with  his  fingers.  It  was  many  silent  minutes  since  the 
storm  of  reproach  with  which  he  had  repelled  her  plea  for  a 
part  in  the  actual  responsible  care  of  her  children  had  died 
away.  He  had  spoken  with  unnecessary  vehemence,  he  knew. 
He  had  admitted  that — said  he  was  sorry,  as  well  as  he  could 
without  withdrawing  from  his  position.  But  he  had  been 
met  by  that  most  formidable  of  all  weapons — a  blank  silence 
— an  inscrutable  face.  Some  sort  of  scene  was  inevitable,  he 
knew.  And  he  sat  there  waiting  for  it.  She  had  been  hurt. 
She  was  undoubtedly  very  angry. 

He  thought  he  was  ready  for  anything.  But  just  the  way 
she  spoke  his  name,  startled — almost  frightened — him,  she 
said  it  so  quietly,  so — tenderly. 

"Roddy,"  she  said,  "I  want  you  to  come  over  here  and  kiss 
me,  and  then  go  back  and  sit  down  in  that  chair  again." 

He  went  a  little  pale  at  that.  The  swing  of  his  foot  was 
arrested  suddenly.  But,  for  a  moment,  he  made  no  move — 
just  looked  wonderingly  into  her  great  grave  eyes. 

"Something's  going  to  happen,"  she  went  on,  "and  before 
it's  over,  I'm  afraid  it's  going  to  hurt  you  terribly — and  me. 
And  I  want  the  kiss  for  us  to  remember.  So  that  we'll  always 
know,  whatever  happens  afterward,  that  we  loved  each  other." 
She  held  out  her  arms  to  him.  "Won't  you  come  ?" 

He  came — a  man  bewildered — bent  down  over  her  and 
found  her  lips ;  but  almost  absently,  out  of  a  daze. 


202  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

"No,  not  like  that,"  she  murmured.     "In  the  old  way." 

There  was  a  long  embrace. 

"I  wouldn't  do  it,"  she  said,  "I  don't  believe  I'd  have  the 
courage  to  do  it,  if  it  were  just  me.  But  there's  some  one 
else — I've  made  some  one  a  promise.  I  can't  tell  you  about 
that.  Now  please  go  back  and  sit  over  there  where  you  were, 
where  we  can  talk  quietly. — Oh,  Roddy,  I  love  you  so ! — No, 
please  go  back,  old  man!  And — and  light  your  pipe.  Oh, 
don't  tremble  like  that !  It — it  isn't  a  tragedy.  It's — for  us, 
it's  the  greatest  hope  in  the  world." 

He  went  back  to  his  chair.  He  even  lighted  his  pipe  as 
she  asked  him  to,  and  waited  as  steadily  as  he  could  for  her 
to  begin. 

But  she  couldn't  begin  while  she  looked  at  him.  She  moved 
a  little  closer  to  the  table  and  leaned  her  elbow  on  it,  shaded 
her  eyes  with  one  hand,  while  the  other  played  with  the 
stump  of  a  pencil  that  happened  to  be  lying  there. 

"Do  you  remember  .  .  ."  she  began,  and  it  was  wonder 
ful  how  quiet  and  steady  her  voice  was.  There  was  even  the 
trace  of  a  smile  about  her  wonderful  mouth.  "Do  you  re 
member  that  afternoon  of  ours,  the  very  first  of  them,  when 
you  brought  home  my  note-books  and  found  me  asleep  on  the 
couch  in  our  old  back  parlor?  Do  you  remember  how  you 
told  me  that  one's  desires  were  the  only  motive  power  he  had  ? 
One  couldn't  ride  anywhere,  you  said,  except  on  the  backs. of 
his  own  passions?  Well,  it  was  a  funny  thing — I  got  to 
wondering  afterward  what  my  desires  were,  and  it  seemed  I 
hadn't  any.  Everything  had,  somehow,  come  to  me  before  I 
knew  I  wanted  it.  Everything  in  the  world,  even  your  love 
for  me,  came  like  that. 

"But  I've  got  a  passion  now,  Rodney.  I've  had  it  for  a 
long  while.  It's  a  desire  I  can't  satisfy.  The  thing  I  want, 
and  there's  nothing  in  the  world  that  I  wouldn't  give  to  get 
it,  is — well,  your  friendship ;  that's  a  way  of  saying  it." 

What  he  had  been  waiting  to  hear,  of  course,  she  didn't 
know.  But  she  knew  by  the  way  he  started  and  stared  at  her, 
that  it  hadn't  been  for  that.  The  thing  struck  him,  it  seemed, 
as  a  sort  of  grotesquely  irritating  anti-climax. 


THE    ONLY   REMEDY  203 

"Gracious  Heaven!"  he  said.  "My  friendship!  Why,  I'm 
in  love  with  you !  That's  certainly  a  bigger  thing.  Go  hack 
to  your  geometry,  child.  The  greater  includes  the  less, 
doesn't  it?" 

"I  don't  know  whether  it's  a  higger  thing  or  not,"  she  said. 
"But  it  doesn't  include  the  other.  Love's  just  a  sort  of 
miracle  thing  that  happens  to  you.  You  don't  have  it  because 
you  deserve  it.  The  person  I  made  that  promise  to  would 
have  earned  it,  if  any  one  could.  But  it  doesn't  come  that 
way.  It's  like  lightning.  It  strikes  or  else  it  doesn't.  Well, 
it  struck  us.  But  friendship — there's  this  about  it.  You 
can't  get  it  any  way  in  the  world,  except  just  by  earning  it. 
Nobody  can  give  it  to  you,  no  matter  how  hard  he  tries.  So 
when  you've  got  it,  you  can  always  say,  'There's  something 
that  I'm  entitled  to — something  that's  mine.'  Your  love  isn't 
mine  any  more  than  the  air  is.  I  never  did  anything  to 
earn  it. 

"And  that's  why  it  can't  satisfy  me. — Because  it  doesn't, 
Roddy.  It  hasn't  for  ever  so  long.  It's  something  wonder 
ful  that's — happened  to  me.  It's  the  loveliest  thing  that  ever 
happened  to  anybody.  And  just  because  it's  so  wonderful  and 
beautiful,  I  can't  bear  to — well,  this  is  hard  to  say — I  can't 
bear  to  use  it  to  live  on.  I  can't  bear  to  have  it  mixed  up  in 
things  like  millinery  bills  and  housekeeping  expense.  I  can't 
bear  to  see  it  become  a  thing  that  piles  a  load  of  hateful 
obligations  on  your  back.  I  could  live  on  your  friendship, 
Roddy;  because  your  friendship  would  mean  that  somehow  I 
was  earning  my  way,  but  I  can't  live  on  your  love ;  any  more 
than  you  could  on  mine.  Won't  you — won't  you  just  try  to 
think  for  a  moment  what  that  would  mean  to  you  ?" 

Now  that  he  had  sensed  the  direction  her  talk  was  headed 
in,  even  though  he  hadn't  even  vaguely  glimpsed  the  point  at 
which  she  was  going  to  bring  up,  he  made  it  much  harder 
for  her  to  talk  to  him.  He  was  tramping  up  and  down  the 
room,  stopping  and  turning  short  every  now  and  then  with  a 
gesture  of  exasperation,  or  an  interruption  that  never  got  be 
yond  two  or  three  words  and  broke  off  always  in  a  sort  of 
frantic  speechlessness. 


204  THE   EEAL   ADVEXTUEE 

She  knew  lie  couldn't  help  it.  Down  underneath  his  mind, 
controlling  utterly  its  processes,  was  a  ganglion  of  instincts 
that  were  utterly  outraged  by  the  things  she  was  saying  to 
him.  It  was  they  and  not  his  intelligence  she  had  to  fight. 
She  must  be  patient,  as  gentle  as  she  could,  but  she  must 
make  him  listen. 

"You've  got  my  friendship !"  he  cried  out  now.  "It's  a 
grotesque  perversion  of  the  facts  to  say  you  haven't." 

She  smiled  at  him  as  she  shook  her  head.  "I've  spent  too 
many  months  trying  to  get  it  and  seeing  myself  fail — oh,  so 
ridiculously ! — not  to  know  what  I  am  talking  about,  Eoddy." 

And  then,  still  smiling,  rather  sadly,  she  told  what  some  of 
the  experiments  had  been — some  of  her  attempts  to  break  into 
the  life  he  kept  locked  away  from  her  and  carry  off  a  share 
of  it  for  herself. 

"I  was  angry  at  first  when  I  found  you  keeping  me  out," 
she  said,  "angry  and  hurt.  I  used  to  cry  about  it.  And  then 
I  saw  it  wasn't  your  fault.  That's  how  I  discovered  friend 
ship  had  to  be  earned." 

But  her  power  to  maintain  that  attitude  of  grave  detach 
ment  was  about  spent.  The  passion  mounted  in  her  voice 
and  in  her  eyes  as  she  went  on. 

"You  thought  it  was  because  of  my  condition,  as  you  called 
it,  that  my  mind  had  got  full  of  wild  ideas ; — the  wild  idea 
that  I  wasn't  really  and  truly  your  wife  at  all,  but  only  your 
mistress,  and  that  I  was  pulling  you  down  from  something 
free  and  fine  that  you  had  been,  to  something  that  you 
despised  yourself  for  being  and  had  to  try  to  deny  you  were. 
Those  were  the  obsessions  of  a  pregnant  woman,  you  thought 
— something  she  was  to  be  soothed  and  coddled  into  forgetting. 
You  were  wrong  about  that,  Eoddy. 

"I  did  have  an  obsession,  but  it  wasn't  the  thing  you 
thought.  It  was  an  obsession  that  kept  me  quiet,  and  con 
tented  and  happy,  and  willing  to  wait  in  spite  of  everything. 
The  obsession  was  that  none  of  those  things  mattered  because 
a  big  miracle  was  coming  that  was  going  to  change  it  all. 
I  was  going  to  have  a  job  at  last — a  job  that  was  just  as  real 
as  yours — the  job  of  being  a  mother." 


THE    ONLY   REMEDY  205 

Her  voice  broke  in  a  fierce  sharp  little  laugh  over  the  word, 
but  she  got  it  back  in  control  again. 

"I  was  going  to  have  a  baby  to  feed  out  of  my  own  body,  to 
keep  alive  with  my  own  care.  There  was  going  to  be  responsi 
bility  and  hard  work,  things  that  demanded  courage  and 
endurance  and  sacrifice.  I  could  earn  your  friendship  with 
that,  I  said.  That  was  the  real  obsession,  Roddy,  and  it 
never  really  died  until  to-night.  Because  of  course  I  have 
kept  on  hoping,  even  after  I  might  have  seen  how  it  was. 
But  the  babies'  lives  aren't  to  be  jeopardized  to  gratify  my 
whims.  Well,  I  suppose  I  can't  complain.  It's  over,  that's 
the  main  thing. 

"And  now,  here  I  am  perfectly  normal  and  well  again — as 
good  as  ever.  I've  kept  my  looks — oh,  my  hair  and  my  com 
plexion  and  my  figure.  I  could  wear  pretty  clothes  again  and 
start  going  out  to  things  now  that  the  season's  begun,  just 
as  I  did  a  year  ago.  People  would  admire  me,  and  you'd 
be  pleased,  and  you'd  love  me  as  much  as  ever,  and  it  would 
all  be  like  the  paradise  it  was  last  year,  except  for  one  thing. 
The  one  thing  is  that  if  I  do  that,  I'll  know  this  time  what 
I  really  am.  Your  mistress,  Roddy;  your  legal,  perfectly 
respectable  mistress, — and  a  little  more  despicable  rather 
than  less,  I  think,  because  of  the  adjectives." 

"I've  let  that  word  go  by  once,"  he  said  quietly,  but  with 
a  dangerous  light  of  anger  in  his  eyes.  "I  won't  again.  It's 
perfectly  outrageous  and  inexcusable  that  you  should  talk 
like  that,  and  I'll  ask  you  never  to  do  it  again." 

"I  won't,"  she  flashed  back  at  him,  "if  you'll  explain  why 
I'm  not  exactly  what  I  say."  And  after  ten  seconds  of 
silence,  she  went  on. 

"Why,  Roddy,  I've  heard  you  describe  me  a  hundred  times. 
Not  the  you  that's  my  lover.  The  other  you ;  talking  all  over 
the  universe  to  Barry  Lake.  You've  described  the  woman 
who's  never  been  trained  nor  taught  nor  disciplined;  who's 
been  brought  up  soft,  with  the  bloom  on,  for  the  purpose  of 
making  her  marriageable ;  who's  never  found  her  job  in  mar 
riage,  who  doesn't  cook,  nor  sew,  nor  spin,  nor  even  take  care 
of  her  own  children;  the  woman  who  uses  her  sex  charm  to 


206  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

save  her  from  having  to  do  hard  ugly  things,  and  keep  her  in 
luxury.  Do  you  remember  what  you've  called  her,  Roddy? 
Do  you  remember  the  word  you've  used  ?  I've  used  a  gentler 
word  than  that. 

"Oh,  you  didn't  know,  you  poor  blind  boy,  that  I  was  the 
woman  you  were  talking  about.  You  never  saw  it  at  all.  But 
I  am.  I  was  brought  up  like  that. — Oh,  not  on  purpose. 
Dear  old  mother !  She  wasn't  trying  to  make  me  into  a 
prostitute  any  more  than  you  are  trying  to  make  me  into 
your  mistress.  You  both  love  me,  that's  all.  It's  just  an 
instinct  not  to  let  anything  hurt  me,  nor  frighten  me,  nor 
tire  me,  nor  teach  me  what  work  is.  She  thought  she  was 
educating  me  to  be  a  lawyer  so  that  when  the  time  came,  I 
could  be  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  woman  movement  just  as 
she'd  been.  And  all  the  while,  without  knowing  it,  she  was 
educating  me  to  be  the  sort  of  person  you'd  fall  in  love  with 
— something  precious  and  expensive — something  to  be  taken 
care  of. 

"I  didn't  understand  any  of  that  when  you  married  me, 
Roddy;  it  was  just  like  a  dream  to  me — like  a  fairy  story 
come  true.  If  any  one  had  told  me  a  year  ago,  that  I  should 
ever  be  anything  but  perfectly  happy  in  your  love  for  me,  I'd 
have  laughed  at  him.  I  remember  telling  Madame  Greville 
that  our  marriage  had  turned  out  well — ended  happily.  And 
she  did  laugh.  That  was  before  I'd  begun  to  understand. 
But  I  do  understand  now.  I  know  why  it  was  you  could  talk 
to  me,  back  in  those  days  before  we  were  married,  about  any 
thing  under  the  sun — things  ten  thousand  miles  above  my 
head;  what  it  was  that  fooled  me  into  thinking  we  were 
friends  as  well  as  lovers.  I  know  why  you've  never  been 
able  to  talk  to  me  like  that  since.  And  I  know — this  is  the 
worst  of  all,  Roddy, — this  is  the  piece  of  knowledge  that  makes 
it  impossible — I  know  what  a  good  mistress  I  could  make.  I 
know  I  could  make  you  love  me  whether  you  wanted  to  or  not ; 
whether  I  loved  you  or  not.  I  could  make  other  men  love  me, 
if  I  could  make  up  my  mind  to  do  it — make  them  tell  me  all 
their  hopes  and  dreams,  and  think  I  had  a  fine  mind  and  a 


THE    ONLY    EEMEDY  207 

wonderful  understanding.  Oh,  it's  too  easy — it's  too  hate 
fully  easy! 

"Do  you  know  why  I  told  you  that?  Because  if  you  be 
lieve  it  and  understand  it,  you  will  see  why  I  can't  go  on 
living  on  your  love.  Because  how  can  you  be  sure,  knowing 
that  my  position  in  the  world,  my  friends — oh,  the  very 
clothes  on  my  back,  and  the  roof  over  my  head,  are  dependent 
on  your  love,— how  are  you  going  to  be  sure  that  my  love 
for  you  is  honest  and  disinterested  ?  What's  to  keep  you  from 
wondering — asking  questions?  Love's  got  to  be  free,  Roddy. 
The  only  way  to  make  it  free  is  to  have  friendship  growing 
alongside  it.  So,  when  I  can  be  your  partner  and  your 
friend,  I'll  be  your  mistress,  too.  But  not — not  again,  Roddy, 
till  I  can  find  a  way.  I'll  have  to  find  it  for  myself.  I'll 
have  to  go  .  .  ." 

She  broke  down  there  over  a  word  she  couldn't  at  first  say, 
buried  her  face  in  her  arms  and  let  a  deep  racking  sob  or  two 
have  their  own  way  with  her.  But  presently  she  sat  erect 
again  and,  with  a  supreme  effort  of  will,  forced  her  voice  to 
utter  the  word. 

"I've  got  to  go  somewhere  alone — away  from  you,  and 
stay  until  I  find  it.  If  I  ever  do,  and  you  want  me,  I'll  come 
back." 


CHAPTER  XVI 

EOSE   OPENS  THE   DOOR 

THE  struggle  between  them  lasted  a  week — a  ghastly  week, 
during  which,  as  far  as  the  surface  of  things  showed,  their 
life  flowed  along  in  its  accustomed  channels.  It  was  a  little 
worse  than  that,  really,  because  the  week  included,  so  an  ironic 
Fate  had  decreed,  Thanksgiving  Day  and  a  jolly  family  party 
at  Frederica's,  with  congratulations  on  the  past,  plans  for  the 
future.  And  Rose  and  Eodney,  as  civilized  persons  will  do, 
kept  their  faces,  accepted  congratulations,  made  gay  plans 
for  the  twins;  smiled  or  laughed  when  necessary — somehow 
or  other,  got  through  with  it. 

But  at  all  sorts  of  times,  and  in  all  sorts  of  places  when 
they  were  alone  together,  the  great  battle  was  renewed; 
mostly  through  the  dead  hours  of  the  night,  in  Rose's  bed 
room,  she  sitting  up  in  bed,  he  tramping  up  and  down, 
shivering  and  shuddering  in  a  big  bath-robe.  It  had  a  hor 
rible  way  of  interrupting  itself  for  small  domestic  common 
places,  which  in  their  assumption  of  the  permanency  of  their 
old  life,  their  blind  disregard  of  the  impending  disaster,  had 
an  almost  unendurable  poignancy.  A  breakfast  on  the  morn 
ing  of  an  execution  is  something  like  that. 

The  hardest  thing  about  it  all  for  Rose — the  thing  that 
came  nearest  to  breaking  down  her  courage — was  to  see  how 
slowly  Rodney  came  to  realize  it  at  all.  He  was  like  a  trapped 
animal  pacing  the  four  sides  of  his  cage  confident  that  in  a 
moment  or  two  he  would  find  the  way  out,  and  then,  incredu 
lously,  dazedly,  coming  to  the  surmise  that  there  was  no  way 
out.  She  really  meant  to  go  away  and  leave  him — leave  the 
babies ;  go  somewhere  where  his  care  and  protection  could  not 
reach  her!  She  was  actually  planning  to  do  it — planning 
the  details  of  doing  it !  By  the  end  of  one  of  their  long  talks, 

208 


ROSE    OPENS   THE   DOOR  209 

it  would  seem  to  her  he  had  grasped  this  monstrous  intention 
and  accepted  it.  But  before  the  beginning  of  the  next  one, 
he  seemed  to  manage  somehow  to  dismiss  the  thing  as  an 
impossible  nightmare. 

An  invitation  came  in  from  the  Crawfords  for  a  dance  at 
the  Blackstone,  the  fifth  of  December,  and  he  said  something 
about  accepting  it. 

"I  shan't  be  here  then,  Roddy,  you  know,"  she  said. 

He  went  completely  to  pieces  at  that,  as  if  the  notion  of 
her  going  away  had  never  really  reached  his  mind  before. 

The  struggle  ranged  through  the  widest  possible  gamut  of 
moods.  They  had  their  moments  of  rapturous  love — passion 
ate  attempts  at  self-surrender.  They  had  long  hours  of  cool 
discussion,  as  impersonal  as  if  they  had  been  talking  about 
the  characters  out  of  a  book  instead  of  about  themselves. 
They  had  stormy  nerve-tearing  hours  of  blind  agonizing, 
around  and  around  in  circles,  lacerating  each  other,  lashing 
out  at  each  other,  getting  nowhere.  They  had  moments  of 
incandescent  anger. 

He  tried,  just  once,  early  in  the  fight,  to  take  the  ground 
he  had  taken  once  before ;  that  she  was  irresponsible,  obsessed. 
There  was  a  fracture  somewhere,  as  James  Randolph's  jargon 
had  it,  in  her  unconscious  mind.  She  didn't  let  him  go  far 
with  that.  He  saw  her  blaze  up  in  a  splendid  burst  of  wrath, 
as  she  had  blazed  once — oh,  an  eternity  ago,  at  a  street-car 
conductor.  Her  challenge  rang  like  a  sword  out  of  a  scab 
bard. 

"We'll  settle  that  before  we  go  any  further,"  she  said. 
"Telephone  for  James  Randolph,  or  any  other  alienist  you 
like.  Let  him  take  me  and  put  me  in  a  sanatorium  somewhere 
and  keep  me  under  observation  as  long  as  he  pleases,  until 
he's  satisfied  whether  I'm  out  of  my  mind  or  not.  But  unless 
you're  willing  to  do  that,  don't  call  me  irresponsible." 

He  grew  more  reasonable  as  a  belief  in  her  complete  serious 
ness  and  determination  sobered  him.  He  made  desperate 
efforts  to  recover  his  self-control — to  get  his  big,  cool,  fine 
mechanism  of  a  mind  into  action.  But  his  mind,  to  his  com 
plete  bewilderment,  betrayed  him.  He'd  always  looked  at 


210  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

Rose  before,  through  the  lens  of  his  emotions.  But  now  that 
he  forced  himself  to  look  at  her  through  the  non-refracting 
window  from  which  he  looked  at  the  rest  of  the  world,  she 
compelled  him  again  and  again  to  admit  that  she  was  right. 

"Why  shouldn't  I  he  right?"  she  said  with  a  woebegone 
smile.  "These  are  all  just  things  I've  learned  from  you." 

After  a  long  and  rather  angry  struggle  with  himself,  he 
made  up  his  mind  to  a  compromise,  and  in  one  of  their  cooler 
talks  together,  he  offered  it. 

"We've  both  of  us  pretty  well  lost  our  sense  of  proportion, 
it  seems  to  me,"  he  said.  "This  whole  ghastly  business  started 
from  my  refusing  to  let  Mrs.  Ruston  go  and  get  a  nurse  who'd 
allow  you  to  be  your  own  nurse-maid.  Well,  I'm  willing  to 
give  up  completely  on  that  point.  You  can  let  Mrs.  Ruston 
go  as  soon  as  you  like  and  get  a  nurse  who'll  meet  with  your 
ideas." 

"You're  doing  that,"  said  Rose  thoughtfully,  "rather  than 
let  me  go  away.  That's  the  way  it  is,  isn't  it?" 

"Why,  yes,  of  course,"  he  admitted.  "I  was  looking  at 
things  from  the  children's  point  of  view,  and  I  thought  I 
was  right.  From  their  point  of  view,  I  still  think  so." 

She  drew  in  a  long  sigh  and  shook  her  head.  "It  won't  do, 
Roddy.  Can't  you  see  you're  giving  way  practically  under  a 
threat — because  I'll  go  away  if  you  don't  ?  But  think  what  it 
would  mean  if  I  did  stay,  on  those  terms.  The  thing  would 
rankle  always.  And  if  anything  did  happen  to  one  of  the 
babies  because  the  new  nurse  wasn't  quite  so  good,  you'd 
never  forgive  me — not  in  all  the  world. 

"And,"  she  added  a  little  later,  "that  would  be  just  as  true 
of  any  other  compromise.  I  mean  like  going  and  living  in  a 
flat  and  letting  me  do  the  housework — any  of  the  things  we've 
talked  about.  I  can  say  I  am  going  away,  don't  you  see,  but 
I  couldn't  say  I'd  go  away — unless  ...  I  couldn't  use 
that  threat  to  extort  things  from  you  without  killing  our 
whole  life  dead.  Can't  you  see  that?" 

His  mind  infuriated  him  by  agreeing  with  her — goaded  him 
into  another  passionate  outburst  during  which  he  accused  her 
of  bad  faith,  of  being  tired  of  him,  anxious  to  get  away  from 


ROSE  OPENS  THE  DOOR        211 

him — seizing  pretexts.  But  he  offered  no  more  compromises. 
The  thing  lie  fell  back  on  after  that  was  a  plea  for  'delay. 
The  question  must  be  decided  coolly ;  not  like  this.  Let  them 
just  put  it  out  of  their  minds  for  a  while,  go  on  with  the  old 
routine  as  if  nothing  threatened  it  and  see  if  things  didn't 
work  somewhat  better — see  if  they  weren't,  after  all,  better 
friends  than  she  thought. 

"If  I  were  ill,  Roddy/'  she  said,  "and  there  was  an  opera 
tion  talked  about ;  if  they  said  to  you  that  there  was  something 
I  might  drag  along  for  years,  half  alive,  without,  but  that 
if  I  had  it,  it  would  either  kill  or  cure,  you  wouldn't  urge 
delay.  "We'd  decide  for  or  against  it  and  be  done.  It's — 
it's  taking  just  all  the  courage  I've  got  to  face  this  thing  now 
that  I  am  excited — now  that  I've  thought  it  out  and  talked 
it  out  with  you — now  that  I've  got  the  big  hope  before  my 
eyes.  But  to  wait  until  I  was  tangled  in  the  old  routine  and 
the  babies  began  to  get  a  little  older  and  more — human,  so 
that  they  knew  me,  and  then  do  it  in  cold  blood !  I  couldn't 
do  that.  We'd  patch  up  some  sort  of  a  life,  pretending  a 
little,  quarreling  a  little,  and  when  my  feelings  got  especially 
hurt  about  something,  I'd  try  to  make  myself  think,  and  you, 
that  I  was  going  away.  And  we'd  both  know  down  inside  that 
we  were  cowards." 

He  protested  against  the  word,  but  she  stuck  to  it. 

"We're  both  afraid  now,"  she  insisted.  "That's  one  of  the 
things  that  makes  us  so  cruel  to  each  other  when  we  talk — 
fear.  The  world's  a  terrible  place  to  me,  Roddy.  I've  never 
ventured  out  alone  in  it;  not  a  step.  A  year  ago,  I  don't 
think  I'd  have  been  so  frightened.  I  didn't  know  then — I'd 
never  really  thought  about  it — what  a  hard  dangerous  thing 
it  is,  just  to  earn  enough  to  keep  yourself  alive.  I  haven't 
any  illusions  now  that  it's  easy — not  after  the  things  I've 
heard  Barry  Lake  tell  about.  But  sometimes  I  think  you're 
more  afraid  than  I;  and  that  you've  got  a  more  intolerable 
thing  to  fear — ridicule — an  intangible  sort  of  pitying  ridicule 
that  you  can't  get  hold  of ;  guessing  at  the  sort  of  things  peo 
ple  will  say  and  never  really  quite  knowing.  And  we  have  each 
got  the  other's  fear  to  suffer  under,  too. — Oh,  Roddy,  Roddy, 


212  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

don't  hate  me  too  bitterly  .  .  .!  But  I  think  if  we  can 
both  endure  it,  stand  the  gaff,  as  you  said  once,  and  know 
that  the  other's  standing  it,  too,  perhaps  that'll  be  the  real 
beginning  of  the  new  life." 

Somehow  or  other,  during  their  calmer  moments  toward 
the  end,  practical  details  managed  to  get  talked  about — set 
tled  after  a  fashion,  without  the  admission  really  being  made 
on  his  part  that  the  thing  was  going  to  happen  at  all. 

"I'd  do  everything  I  could  of  course,  to  make  it  easier," 
she  said.  "We  could  have  a  story  for  people  that  I'd  gone  to 
California  to  make  mother  a  long  visit.  You  could  bring 
Harriet  home  from  Washington  to  keep  house  while  I  was 
gone.  I'd  take  my  trunks,  you  see,  and  really  go.  People 
would  suspect  of  course,  after  a  while,  but  they'll  always  pre 
tend  to  believe  anything  that's  comfortable — anything  that 
saves  scenes  and  shocks  and  explanations." 

"Where  would  you  go,  really?"  he  demanded.  "Have  you 
any  plan  at  all?" 

"I  have  a  sort  of  plan,"  she  said.  "I  think  I  know  of  a  way 
of  earning  a  living." 

But  she  didn't  offer  to  go  on  and  tell  him  what  it  was,  and 
after  a  little  silence,  he  commented  bitterly  on  this  omission. 

"You  won't  even  give  me  the  poor  satisfaction  of  knowing 
what  you're  doing,"  he  said. 

"I'd  love  to,"  she  said,  " — to  be  able  to  write  to  you,  hear 
from  you.  every  day.  But  I  don't  believe  you  want  to  know. 
I  think  it  would  be  too  hard  for  you.  Because  you'd  have  to 
promise  not  to  try  to  get  me  back — not  to  come  and  rescue 
me  if  I  got  into  trouble  and  things  went  badly  and  I  didn't 
know  where  to  turn.  Could  you  promise  that,  Eoddy  ?" 

He  gave  a  groan  and  buried  his  face  in  his  hands.    Then : 

"ISTo,"  he  said  furiously.  "Of  course  I  couldn't.  See  you 
suffering  and  stand  by  with  my  hands  in  my  pockets  and 
•watch !"  He  sprang  up  and  seized  her  by  the  arms  in  a  grip 
that  actually  left  bruises,  and  fairly  shook  her  in  the  agony 
of  his  entreaty.  "Tell  me  it's  a  nightmare,  Rose,"  he  said. 
"Tell  me  it  isn't  true.  Wake  me  up  out  of  it !" 

But  under  the  indomitable  resolution  of  her  blue  eyes,  he 


ROSE    OPENS   THE   DOOR  213 

turned  away.  This  was  the  last  appeal  of  that  sort  that  he 
made. 

"I'll  promise,"  she  said  presently,  "to  be  sensible — not  to 
take  any  risks  I  don't  have  to  take.  I'll  regard  my  life  and 
my  health  and  all,  as  something  I'm  keeping  in  trust  for  you. 
I'll  take  plenty  of  warm  sensible  clothes  when  I  go;  lots  of 
shoes  and  stockings — things  like  that,  and  if  you'll  let  me, 
I'll — I'll  borrow  a  hundred  dollars  to  start  myself  off  with. 
It  isn't  a  tragedy,  Roddy, — not  that  part  of  it.  You  wouldn't 
be  afraid  for  any  one  else  as  big  and  strong  and  healthy  as  I." 

Gradually,  out  of  the  welter  of  scenes  like  that,  the  thing 
got  itself  recognized  as  something  that  was  to  happen.  But 
the  parting  came  at  last  in  a  little  different  way  from  any 
they  had  foreseen. 

Rodney  came  home  from  his  office  early  one  afternoon,  with 
a  telegram  that  summoned  him  to  New  York  to  a  conference 
of  counsel  in  a  big  public  utility  case  he  had  been  working  on 
for  months.  He  must  leave,  if  he  were  going  at  all,  at  five 
o'clock.  He  ransacked  the  house,  vainly  at  first,  for  Rose,  and 
found  her  at  last  in  the  trunk-room — dusty,  disheveled,  sob 
bing  quietly  over  something  she  held  hugged  in  her  arms.  But 
she  dried  her  eyes  and  came  over  to  him  and  asked  what  it 
was  that  had  brought  him  home  so  early. 

He  showed  her  the  telegram.  "I'll  have  to  leave  in  an  hour," 
he  said,  "if  I'm  to  go." 

She  paled  at  that,  and  sat  down  rather  giddily  on  a  trunk. 
"You  must  go,"  she  said,  "of  course.  And — Roddy,  I  guess 
that'll  be  the  easiest  way.  I'll  get  my  telegram  to-night — pre 
tend  to  get  it — from  Portia.  And  you  can  give  me  the  hun 
dred  dollars,  and  then,  when  you  come  back,  I'll  be  gone." 

The  thing  she  had  been  holding  in  her  hands  slipped  to  the 
floor.  He  stooped  and  picked  it  up — stared  at  it  with  a  sort 
of  half  awakened  recognition. 

"I  f-found  it,"  she  explained,  "among  some  old  things 
Portia  sent  over  when  she  moved.  Do  you  know  what  it  is? 
It's  one  of  the  note-books  that  got  wet — that  first  night  when 
we  were  put  off  the  street-car.  And — and,  Roddy,  look!" 


214  THE    KEAL   ADVENTURE 

She  opened  it  to  an  almost  blank  page,  and  with  a  weak 
little  laugh,  pointed  to  the  thing  that  was  written  there : 

"  'March  fifteenth,  nineteen  twelve !'  Your  birthday,  you 
see,  and  the  day  we  met  each  other." 

And  then,  down  below,  the  only  note  she  had  made  during 
the  whole  of  that  lecture,  he  read :  "Never  marry  a  man  with 
a  passion  for  principles." 

"That's  the  trouble  with  us,  you  see,"  she  said.  "If  you  were 
just  an  ordinary  man  without  any  big  passions  or  anything,  it 
wouldn't  matter  much  if  your  life  got  spoiled.  But  with 
us,  we've  got  to  try  for  the  biggest  thing  there  is.  Oh,  Eoddy4 
Eoddy,  darling!  Hold  me  tight  for  just  a  minute,  and  then 
I'll  come  and  help  you  pack." 


BOOK  THREE 

The  World  Alone 


THE  LENGTH  OF  A  THOUSAND  YARDS 

"HERE'S  the  first  week's  rent  then,"  said  Rose,  handing  the 
landlady  three  dollars,  "and  I  think  you'd  better  give  me  a 
receipt  showing  till  when  it's  paid  for.  Do  you  know  where 
there's  an  expressman  who  would  go  for  a  trunk?" 

The  landlady  had  tight  gray  hair,  a  hard  hitten  hatchet 
face,  and  a  back  that  curved  through  a  forty-degree  arc  be 
tween  the  lumbar  and  the  cervical  vertebrae,  a  curve  which 
was  accentuated  by  the  faded  longitudinal  blue  and  white 
stripes — like  ticking — of  the  dress  she  wore.  She  had  no 
charms,  one  would  have  said,  of  person,  mind  or  manner. 
But  it  was  nevertheless  true  that  Rose  was  renting  this  room 
largely  on  the  strength  of  the  landlady.  She  was  so  much 
more  humanly  possible  than  any  of  the  others  at  whose  pla 
carded  doors  Rose  had  knocked  or  rung  .  .  . ! 

For  the  last  year  and  a  half,  anyway  since  she  had  married 
Rodney  Aldrich,  the  surface  that  life  had  presented  to  her  had 
been  as  bland  as  velvet.  She'd  never  been  spoken  to  by  any 
body  except  in  terms  of  politeness.  All  the  people  she  en 
countered  could  be  included  under  two  categories :  her  friends, 
if  one  stretches  the  word  to  include  all  her  social  acquaint 
ances,  and,  in  an  equally  broad  sense,  her  servants ;  that  is  to 
say,  people  who  earned  their  living  by  doing  things  she  wanted 
done.  Her  friends'  and  her  servants'  manners  were  not  alike, 
to  be  sure,  but  as  far  as  intent  went,  they  came  to  the  same 
thing.  They  presented,  whatever  passions,  misfortunes,  dis 
likes,  uncomfortable  facts  of  any  sort  might  lie  in  the  back 
ground,  a  smooth  and  practically  frictionless,  bearing  sur 
face.  A  person  accustomed  to  that  surface  develops  a  soft 
skin.  This  was  about  the  first  of  Rose's  discoveries. 

To  be  looked  at  with  undisguised  suspicion — to  have  a  door 

217 


218  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

slammed  in  her  face  as  the  negative  answer  to  a  civil  question, 
left  her  at  first  bewildered,  and  then  enveloped  in  a  blaze  of 
indignation.  It  was  perhaps  lucky  for  her  that  this  happened 
at  the  very  beginning  of  her  pilgrimage.  Because,  with  that 
fire  once  alight  within  her,  Rose  could  go  through  anything. 
The  horrible  fawning,  leering  landlady  whom  she  had  en 
countered  later,  might  have  turned  her  sick,  but  for  that  fine 
steady  glow.  The  hatchet-faced  one  she  had  finally  arrived  at, 
made  no  protestations  of  her  own  respectability,  and  she 
seemed,  though  rather  reluctantly,  willing  to  assume  that 
of  her  prospective  lodger.  She  was  puzzled  about  something, 
Rose  could  see ;  disposed  to  be  very  watchful  and  at  no  pains 
to  conceal  this  attitude. 

"Well,  she'd  probably  learned  that  she  had  to  watch,  poor 
thing!  And,  for  that  matter,  Rose  would  probably  have  to 
do  some  watching  on  her  own  account.  And,  if  the  fact  was 
there,  why  bother  to  keep  up  a  contradictory  fiction.  So  Rose 
asked  for  a  receipt. 

The  matter  of  the  trunk  was  easily  disposed  of.  Rose  had 
a  check  for  it.  It  was  at  the  Polk  Street  Station.  There  was 
a  cigar  and  news  stand  two  blocks  down,  the  landlady  said, 
where  an  expressman  had  his  headquarters.  There  was  a  bkie 
sign  out  in  front:  "Sclmlz  Express";  Rose  couldn't  miss  it. 

The  landlady  went  away  to  write  out  a  receipt.  Rose  closed 
the  door  after  her  and  locked  it. 

It  was  a  purely  symbolistic  act.  She  wasn't  going  to 
change  her  clothes  or  anything,  and  she  didn't  particularly 
want  to  keep  anybody  out.  But,  in  a  sense  in  which  it  had 
never  quite  been  true  before,  this  was  her  room,  a  room  where 
any  one  lacking  her  specific  invitation  to  enter,  would  be  an 
intruder — a  condition  that  had  not  obtained  either  in  her 
mother's  house  or  in  Rodney's. 

She  smiled  widely  over  the  absurdity  of  indulging  in  a 
pleasurable  feeling  of  possession  in  a  squalid  little  cubby-hole 
like  this.  The  wall-paper  was  stained  and  faded,  the  paint  on 
the  soft-wood  floor  worn  through  in  streaks ;  there  was  an  iron 
bed — a  double  bed,  painted  light  blue  and  lashed  with  string 
where  one  of  its  joints  showed  a  disposition  to  pull  out.  The 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  219 

! 

mattress  on  the  bed  was  lumpy.  There  was  a  dingy-looking 
oak  bureau  with  a  rather  small  but  pretty  good  plate-glass 
mirror  on  it;  a  marble  topped,  black  walnut  wash-stand;  a 
pitcher  of  the  plainest  and  cheapest  white  ware  standing  in 
a  bowl  on  top  of  it,  and  a  highly  ornate,  hand-painted  slop-jar 
— the  sole  survivor,  evidently,  of  a  much  prized  set — under  the 
lee  of  it.  The  steep  gable  of  the  roof  cut  away  most  of  one 
side  of  the  room,  though  there  would  be  space  for  Eose's  trunk 
to  stand  under  it,  and  across  the  corner,  at  a  curiously  dis 
tressing  angle,  hung  an  inadequate  curtain  that  had  five  or 
six  clothes  hooks  behind  it. 

In  the  foreground  of  the  view  out  of  the  window,  was  a 
large  oblong  plateau — the  flat  roof  of  an  extension  which  had 
casually  been  attached  to  the  front  of  the  building  and  carried 
it  forward  to  the  sidewalk  over  what  had  once  been  a  small 
front  yard.  The  extension  had  a  plate-glass  front  and  was 
occupied,  Eose  had  noticed  before  she  plunged  into  the  little 
tunnel  that  ran  alongside  it  and  led  to  the  main  building, 
by  a  dealer  in  delicatessen.  Over  the  edge  of  the  flat  roof, 
she  could  see  the  top  third  of  two  endless  streams  of  trolley- 
cars,  for  the  traffic  in  this  street  was  heavy,  by  night,  she 
imagined,  as  well  as  l>y  day. 

The  opposite  facade  of  the  street,  like  the  one  of  which  her 
own  wall  and  window  formed  a  part,  was  highly  irregular 
and  utterly  casual.  There  were  cheap  two-story  brick  stores 
with  false  fronts  that  carried  them  up  a  half  story  higher. 
There  were  little  gable-ended  cottages  with  their  fronts  hacked 
out  into  show-windows.  There  were  double  houses  of  brick 
with  stone  trimmings  that  once  had  had  some  residential 
pretensions.  The  one  characteristic  that  they  possessed  in 
common,  was  that  of  having  been  designed,  patently,  for  some 
purpose  totally  different  from  the  one  they  now  served. 

The  shops  on  the  street  level  had,  for  the  most  part,  an 
air  of  shabby  prosperity.  There  was,  within  the  space  Eose's 
window  commanded,  a  cheap  little  tailor  shop,  the  important 
part  of  whose  business  was  advertised  by  the  sign  "pressing 
done."  There  was  a  tobacconist's  shop  whose  unwashed  win 
dows  revealed  an  array  of  large  wooden  buckets  and  dusty 


220  THE    KEAL   ADVENTURE 

lithographs;  a  shoe  shop  that  did  repairing  neatly  while  you 
waited;  a  rather  fly-specked  looking  bakery.  There  was  a 
saloon  on  the  corner,  and  beside  it,  a  four-foot  doorway  with 
a  painted  transom  over  it  that  announced  it  as  the  entrance 
of  the  Bellevue  Hotel. 

The  signs  on  the  second-story  windows  indicated  dentist 
parlors,  the  homes  of  mid-wives,  ladies'  tailors  and  dress 
makers,  and  everywhere  furnished  rooms  for  light  house 
keeping  to  let. 

The  people  who  patronized  those  shops,  who  drank  their 
beer  at  the  corner  saloon,  who'd  be  coming  hurriedly  in  the 
night  to  ring  up  the  mid-wife,  who  smoked  the  sort  of  tobacco 
that  was  sold  from  those  big  wooden  buckets ;  the  people  who 
lounged  along  the  wide  sidewalks,  or  came  riding  down-town 
at  seven  in  the  morning,  and  back  at  six  at  night,  packed 
so  tight  that  they  couldn't  get  their  arms  up  to  hold  by  the 
straps  in  the  big  roaring  cars  that  kept  that  incessant  pro 
cession  going  in  the  middle  of  the  street — they  all  inhabited, 
Eose  realized,  a  world  utterly  different  from  the  one  she  had 
left.  The  distance  between  the  hurrying  life  she  looked  out 
on  through  her  grimy  window,  and  that  which  she  had  been 
wont  to  contemplate  through  Florence  McCrea's  exquisitely 
leaded  casements,  was  simply  planetary. 

And  yet,  queerly  enough,  in  terms  of  literal  lineal  measure 
ment,  the  distance  between  the  windows  themselves,  was  less 
than  a  thousand  yards.  Less  than  ten  minutes'  walking  from 
the  mouth  of  the  little  tunnel  alongside  the  delicatessen  shop, 
would  take  her  back  to  her  husband's  door.  She  had,  in  her 
flight  out  into  the  new  world,  doubled  back  on  her  trail.  And, 
such  is  the  enormous  social  and  spiritual  distance  between 
North  Clark  Street  and  The  Drive,  she  was  as  safely  hidden 
here,  as  completely  out  of  the  orbit  of  any  of  her  friends,  or 
even  of  her  friends'  servants,  as  she  could  have  been  in  New 
York  or  in  San  Francisco. 

Having  to  come  away  furtively  like  this  was  a  terrible 
countermine  beneath  her  courage.  If  only  she  could  have 
had  a  flourish  of  defiant  trumpets  to  speed  her  on  her  way ! 
But,  done  like  that,  the  thing  would  have  hurt  Eodney  too 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  221 

intolerably.  His  intelligence  might  be  twentieth  century  or 
beyond.  It  might  acquiesce  in,  or  even  enthusiastically  advo 
cate,  a  relation  between  men  and  women  that  hadn't  existed, 
anyway  since  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  Era;  it  might 
accept  without  faltering,  all  the  corollaries  pendent  to  that 
relation.  But  his  actuating  instincts,  his  psychical  reflexes, 
stretched  their  roots  away  back  to  the  Middle  Ages.  Under 
the  dominance  of  those  instincts,  a  man  lost  caste — became 
an  object  of  contemptuous  derision,  if  he  couldn't  keep  his 
wife.  It  was  bad  enough  to  have  another  man  take  her  away 
from  him,  but  it  was  worse  to  have  her  go  away  in  the  absence 
of  such  an  excuse;  worst  of  all,  to  have  her  go  away  to  seek 
a  job  and  earn  her  own  living. 

Eose  didn't  know  how  long  the  secret  could  be  kept. 
Wherever  she  went,  whatever  she  did,  there'd  always  be  the 
risk  that  some  one  who  could  carry  back  the  news  to  Rodney's 
friends,  would  recognize  her.  It  was  a  risk  that  had  to  be 
taken,  and  she  didn't  intend  to  allow  herself  to  be  paralyzed 
by  a  perpetual  dread  of  what  might  at  any  time  happen.  At 
the  same  time,  she'd  protect  the  secret  as  well  as  she  could. 

But  there  were  two  people  it  couldn't  be  kept  from — Portia 
and  her  mother.  Rose  had  at  first  entertained  the  notion  of 
keeping  her  mother  in  the  dark.  It  wasn't  until  she  had  spent 
a  good  many  hours  figuring  out  expedients  for  keeping  the  de 
ception  going,  that  she  realized  it  couldn't  be  done.  She 
had  been  writing  her  mother  a  letter  a  week  ever  since  the 
departure  to  California — letters  naturally  full  of  domestic 
details  that  simply  couldn't  be  kept  up.  The  only  possible 
deception  would  be  a  compromise  with  the  truth  and  com 
promises  of  that  sort  are  apt  to  be  pretty  unsatisfactory. 
They  suggest  concealments  in  every  phase,  and  to  an  imagi 
native  mind,  are  more  terrifying,  nine  times  in  ten,  than 
the  truth  you're  trying  to  soften.  Then,  too,  the  story  given 
out  to  Rodney's  friends  being  that  Rose  was  in  California  with 
her  mother  and  Portia,  left  the  chance  always  open  for  some 
contretemps  which  would  lead  to  her  mother's  discovering 
the  truth  in  a  surprising  and  shocking  way. 

But  the  truth  itself,  confidently  stated,  not  as  a  tragic  end- 


222  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

ing,  but  as  the  splendid  hopeful  beginning  of  a  life  of  truer 
happiness  for  Rose  and  her  husband,  needn't  be  a  shock.  So 
this  was  what  Rose  had  borne  down  on  in  her  letter  to  Portia. 
It  wasn't  a  very  long  letter,  considering  how  much  it  had 
to  tell. 

"...  I  have  found  the  big  thing  couldn't  be  had 
without  a  fight,"  she  wrote.  "You  shouldn't  be  surprised, 
because  you've  probably  found  out  for  yourself  that  nothing 
worth  having  comes  very  easily.  But  you're  not  to  worry 
about  me,  nor  be  afraid  for  me,  because  I'm  going  to  win. 
I'm  making  the  fight,  somehow,  for  3rou  as  well  as  for  myself. 
I  want  you  to  know  that.  I  think  that  realizing  I  was  living 
your  life  as  well  as  mine,  is  what  has  given  me  the  courage 
to  start.  .  .  . 

"I've  got  some  plans,  but  I'm  not  going  to  tell  you  what 
they  are.  But  I'll  write  to  you  every  week  and  tell  you  what 
I've  done  and  I  want  you  to  write  to  Rodney.  I  want  to  be 
sure  that  you  understand  this:  Rodney  isn't  to  blame  for 
what's  happened.  I  don't  feel  that  I  am,  either,  exactly. 
We're  just  in  a  situation  that  there's  only  one  real  way  out  of. 
I  don't  know  whether  he  sees  that  yet  or  not.  He's  too  ter 
ribly  hurt  and  bewildered.  But  we  haven't  quarreled,  and  I 
believe  we're  further  in  love  with  each  other  than  we've  ever 
been  before.  I  know  I  am  with  him.  .  .  . 

"Break  this  thing  to  mother  as  gently  as  you  like,  but  tell 
her  everything  before  you  stop.  .  .  . 

This  letter  written  and  despatched,  she  had  worked  out  the 
details  of  her  departure  with  a  good  deal  of  care.  In  her  own 
house,  before  her  servants,  she  had  tried  to  act — and  she  felt 
satisfied  that  her  attempt  was  successful — just  as  she  wrould 
have  done  had  her  pretended  telegram  really  come  from 
Portia.  She  had  packed,  looked  up  trains,  made  a  reservation. 
She  had  called  up  Frederica  and  told  her  the  news.  The 
train  she  had  selected  left  at  an  hour  and  on  a  day  when  she 
knew  Frederica  wouldn't  be  able  to  come  and  see  her  off. 
Frederica  had  come  down  to  the  house  of  course  to  say  good- 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  223 

by  to  her,  and  carrying  her  pretense  through  that  scene,  that 
had  for  her  so  much  deeper  and  more  poignant  a  regret  than 
she  dared  show — because  she  really  loved  Frederica — was, 
next  to  bidding  the  twins  good-by,  the  hardest  thing  she  had 
to  go  through  with.  Lying  and  pretending  were  always  ter 
ribly  hard  for  Rose,  and  a  lie  to  any  one  she  was  fond  of, 
almost  impossible.  The  only  thing  that  enabled  her  to  see 
it  through,  was  the  consideration  that  she  was  doing  it  for 
Rodney.  He'd  probably  tell  Frederica  what  had  happened  in 
time,  but  Rose  was  determined  that  he  should  have  the  privi 
lege  of  choosing  his  own  time  for  doing  it. 

Her  bag  was  packed,  her  trunk  was  gone,  her  motor  waiting 
at  the  door  to  take  her  to  the  station,  when  the  maid  Doris 
brought  the  twins  home  from  their  airing.  This  wasn't 
chance,  but  prearrangement. 

"Give  them  to  me,"  Rose  said,  "and  then  you  may  go  up 
and  tell  Mrs.  Ruston  she  may  have  them  in  a  few  minutes." 

She  took  them  into  her  bedroom  and  laid  them  side  by 
side  on  her  bed.  They  had  thriven  finely — justified,  as  far 
as  that  went,  Harriet's  decision  in  favor  of  bottle  feeding. 
Had  she  died  back  there  in  that  bed  of  pain,  never  come  out 
of  the  ether  at  all,  they'd  still  be  just  like  this — plump, 
placid,  methodical.  Rose  had  thought  of  that  a  hundred 
times,  but  it  wasn't  what  she  was  thinking  of  now. 

The  thing  that  caught  her  as  she  stood  looking  down  on 
them,  was  the  wave  of  sudden  pity.  She  saw  them  sud 
denly  as  persons  with  the  long  road  all  ahead  of  them,  as 
a  boy  and  a  girl,  a  youth  and  a  maid,  a  man  and  a  woman. 
They  were  destined  to  have  their  hopes  and  loves,  fears, 
triumphs,  tragedies  perhaps.  The  boy  there,  Rodney,  might 
have  to  face,  some  day,  the  situation  his  father  confronted 
now ;  might  have  to  come  back  into  an  empty  home,  and  turn 
a  stiff  inexpressive  face  on  a  coolly  curious  world.  Little  Por 
tia  there  might  find  herself,  some  day,  gazing  with  wide 
scared  eyes,  at  a  life  some  unexpected  turn  of  the  wheel  of 
Fate  had  thrust  her,  all  unprepared,  into  the  midst  of.  Or  it 
might  be  her  fate  to  love  without  attracting  love — to  drain 
all  the  blood  out  of  her  life  in  necessary  sacrifices ;  to  wither 


224  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

that  some  one  else  might  have  a  chance  to  grow.  Those 
possibilities  were  all  there  before  these  two  solemn,  staring, 
little  helpless  things  on  the  bed.  What  toys  of  Chance  they 
were ! 

She'd  never  thought  of  them  like  that  before.  The  baby 
she  had  looked  forward  to — the  baby  she  hadn't  had — had 
never  been  thought  of  that  way  either.  It  was  to  be  something 
to  provide  her,  Rose,  with  an  occupation;  to  enable  her  to 
interpret  her  life  in  new  terms;  to  make  an  alchemic  change 
in  the  very  substance  of  it.  The  transmutation  hadn't  taken 
place.  She  surmised  now,  dimly,  that  she  hadn't  deserved  it 
should. 

"You've  never  had  a  mother  at  all,  you  poor  little  mites," 
she  said.  "But  you're  going  to  have  one  some  day.  You're 
going  to  be  able  to  come  to  her  with  your  troubles,  because 
she'll  have  had  troubles  herself.  She'll  help  you  bear  your 
hurts,  because  she's  had  hurts  of  her  own.  And  she'll  be  able 
to  teach  you  to  stand  the  gaff,  because  she's  stood  it  herself." 

For  the  first  time  since  they  were  born,  she  was  thinking 
of  their  need  of  her  rather  than  of  her  need  of  them  and  with 
that  thought,  came  for  the  first  time,  the  surge  of  passionate 
maternal  love  that  she  had  waited  for,  so  long  in  vain.  There 
was,  suddenly,  an  intolerable  ache  in  her  heart  that  could 
only  have  been  satisfied  by  crushing  them  up  against  her 
breast;  kissing  their  hands — their  feet. 

Rose  stood  there  quivering,  giddy  with  the  force  of  it. 
"Oh,  you  darlings !"  she  said.  "But  wait — wait  until  I  de 
serve  it!"  And  without  touching  them  at  all,  she  went  to 
the  door  and  opened  it.  Mrs.  Ruston  and  Doris  were  both 
waiting  in  the  hall. 

"I  must  go  now,"  she  said.  "Good-by.  Keep  them  carefully 
for  me."  Her  voice  was  steady,  and  though  her  eyes  were 
bright,  there  was  no  trace  of  tears  upon  her  cheeks.  But 
there  was  a  kind  of  glory  shining  in  her  face  that  was  too 
much  for  Doris,  who  turned  away  and  sobbed  loudly.  Even 
Mrs.  Ruston's  eyes  were  wet. 

"Good-by,"  said  Rose  again,  and  went  down  composedly 
enough  to  her  car. 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  225 

She  rode  down  to  the  station,  shook  hands  with  and  said 
good-by  to  Otto,  the  chauffeur,  allowed  the  porter  to  carry 
her  bag  into  the  waiting-room.  There  she  tipped  the  porter, 
picked  up  the  bag  herself,  and  walked  out  the  other  door; 
crossed  over  to  Clark  Street  and  took  a  street-car.  At  Chi 
cago  Avenue  she  got  off  and  walked  north,  keeping  her  eye 
open  for  placards  advertising  rooms  to  let.  It  was  at  the  end 
of  about  a  half  mile  that  she  found  the  hatchet-faced  land 
lady,  paid  her  three  dollars,  and  locked  her  door,  as  a  symbol, 
perhaps,  of  the  bigger  heavier  door  that  she  had  swung  to  and 
locked  on  the  whole  of  her  past  life. 

Amid  all  the  welter  of  emotions  boiling  up  within  her, 
grief  was  not  present.  There  was  a  very  deep-reaching  ex 
citement  that  sharpened  all  her  faculties ;  that  even  made  her 
see  colors  more  brightly  and  hear  fainter  sounds.  There  was 
an  intent  eagerness  to  get  the  new  life  fairly  begun.  But, 
strangest  of  all,  and  yet  so  vivid  that  even  its  strangeness 
couldn't  prevent  her  being  aware  of  it,  was  a  perfectly  enor 
mous  relief.  The  thing  which,  when  she  had  first  faced  it  as 
the  only  thoroughfare  to  the  real  life  she  so  passionately 
wanted,  had  seemed  such  a  veritable  nightmare,  was  an  ac 
complished  fact.  The  week  of  acute  agony  she  had  lived 
through  while  she  was  forcing  her  sudden  resolution  on  Eod- 
ney  had  been  all  but  unendurable  with  the  enforced  con 
templation  of  the  moment  of  parting  which  it  brought  so  re 
lentlessly  nearer.  There  had  been  a  terror,  too,  lest  when  the 
moment  actually  came,  she  couldn't  do  it.  Well,  and  now 
it  had  come  and  gone!  The  surgery  of  the  thing  was  over. 
The  nerves  and  sinews  were  cut.  The  thing  was  done.  The 
girl  who  stood  there  now  in  her  three-dollar  room  was  free; 
had  won  a  fresh  blank  page  to  write  the  characters  of  her 
life  upon. 

She  felt  a  little  guilty  about  this.  What  heartless  sort  of 
a  monster  must  she  be  to  feel — why,  actually  happy,  at  a 
moment  like  this  ?  She  ought  to  be  prone  on  the  bed,  her  face 
buried  in  the  musty  pillow,  sobbing  her  heart  out. 

But  presently,  standing  there,  looking  down  on  the  lumpy 
bed,  she  smiled  widely  instead,  over  the  notion  of  doing  it  as 


226  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

a  sort  of  concession  to  respectability.  She  had  got  her  abso 
lution  from  Kodney  himself  out  of  the  memory  of  their  first 
real  talk  together.  Discipline,  he'd  said,  was  accepting  the 
facts  of  life  as  they  were.  Not  raising  a  lamentation  because 
they  weren't  different.  The  only  way  you  had  of  getting  any 
where  was  by  riding  on  the  backs  of  your  own  passions. 
Well,  her  great  ride  was  just  beginning! 

Eose  dusted  the  mirror  with  a  towel — a  reckless  act,  as  she 
saw  for  herself,  when  she  discovered  she  was  going  to  have  to 
use  that  towel  for  a  week — and  took  an  appraising  look  at  her 
self.  Then  she  nodded  confidently — there  was  nothing  the 
matter  with  her  looks — and  resumed  her  ulster,  her  rubbers 
and  her  umbrella,  for  it  Avas  the  kind  of  December  day  that 
called  for  all  three.  Her  landlady  could  stick  the  receipt  under 
the  door,  she  reflected,  as  she  locked  it. 

Two  blocks  down  the  street,  she  found,  as  predicted,  the 
cigar  store  with  the  blue  sign,  "Schulz  Express,"  and  left 
her  trunk  check  there  with  her  address  and  fifty  cents.  Then, 
putting  up  her  umbrella,  and  glowingly  conscious  that  she  was 
saving  a  nickel  by  so  doing,  she-set  off  down-town  afoot  to  get 
a  job.  She  meant  to  get  it  that  very  afternoon.  And,  partly 
because  she  meant  to  so  very  definitely,  she  did. 

I  don't  mean  to  say  that  getting  a  job  is  a  purely  volitional 
matter.  There  is  the  factor  of  luck,  always  large  of  course, 
though  not  quite  so  large  as  a  great  many  people  suppose, 
and  the  factor  of  intelligence.  Eose's  intelligence  had  been 
in  pretty  active  training  for  the  last  year.  Ever  since  her 
talk  with  Simone  Greville  had  set  her  thinking,  she  had  been 
learning  how  to  weigh  and  assess  facts  apart  from  their  emo 
tional  nebulas.  She'd  taught  herself  how  to  look  a  disagree 
able  or  humiliating  fact  in  the  face  as  steadily  and  as  coolly 
as  she  looked  at  any  other  fact. 

She  had  accumulated  a  whole  lot  of  facts  about  women 
in  industry  from  Barry  Lake  and  Jane.  She  knew  the  sort  of 
job  and  the  sort  of  pay  that  the  average  untrained  woman 
gets.  She  knew  some  of  the  reasons  why  the  pay  was  so 
miserably,  intolerably  small.  She  knew  about  the  vast  army  of 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  227 

young  women  who  weren't  expected  to  be  fully  self-support 
ing,  who  counted  on  marrying  comfortably  enough  some  day, 
and  accepted  board  and  lodging  at  home  as  one  of  the  natural 
laws  of  existence.  But  who,  if  they  wanted  pocket  money, 
pretty  enough  clothes  to  make  them  attractive  enough  for 
men  to  want  to  marry;  who,  if  they  wanted  to  escape  the 
stupid  drudgery  of  housework  at  home,  had  to  go  to  work. 
They'd  rather  get  eight  dollars  a  week  than  six,  of  course,  or 
ten  than  eight.  But  as  long  as  even  six  was  velvet  (cotton- 
backed  velvet,  one  might  say)  they'd  take  that,  cheerfully 
oblivious  to  the  fact,  as  naturally  one  might  expect  them  to  be, 
that  by  taking  six,  they  established  a  standard  at  which  a 
girl  who  had  to  earn  her  own  living  simply  couldn't  live. 

Rose  knew  exactly  what  would  happen  to  her  if  she  went 
to  one  of  the  big  State  Street  department  stores  and  asked 
for  a  job.  Jane  had  been  trying  some  experiments  lately,  and 
stating  her  results  with  convincing  vivacity  at  their  little  din 
ners  afterward.  There  was  no  thoroughfare  there. 

She  knew  too,  what  sort  of  life  she'd  have  to  face  if  she 
offered  herself  out  in  the  West  Side  factory  district  as  a 
cracker  packer,  a  chocolate  dipper,  a  glove  stitcher;  any  of 
those  things.  You  got  a  sort  of  training,  of  course,  at  any 
one  of  these  trades.  You  learned  to  develop  a  certain  uncanny 
miraculous  speed  and  skill  in  some  one  small  operation,  as, 
remorseless  and  unvaried  as  the  coming  into  mesh  and  out 
again  of  two  cogs  in  a  pair  of  gears.  But  the  very  highest 
skill  could  just  about  be  made  to  keep  you  alive,  and  it  led 
to  nothing  else.  You  wore  out  your  body  and  asphyxiated 
your  soul. 

Rose  didn't  mean  to  do  that.  She  was  holding  both  body 
and  soul  in  trust.  The  penitential  mood  that  had  resulted 
from  her  talk  with  Portia  was  utterly  gone.  She  wasn't  look 
ing  for  hurts.  Deliberately  to  impose  tortures  on  herself  was 
as  far  from  her  intent  as  shirking  any  of  the  inevitable  trials 
that  should  come  to  her  in  the  course  of  the  day's  work. 

The  only  way  she  could  see  to  a  life  of  decent  self-respect 
ing  independence  lay  through  same  sort  of  special  training — 


228  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

business  training,  she  thought.  She'd  begin  by  learning  to 
be  a  stenographer — a  cracking  good  stenographer.  Miss 
Beach  had  begun  that  way.  She  had  a.  real  job. 

Only,  Rose  had  first  to  get  a  job  that  would  pay  for  her 
training;  and  not  only  pay  for  it,  but  leave  time  for  it;  a 
problem  which  might  have  seemed  like  the  problem  of  lifting 
yourself  by  your  boot  straps,  if  it  hadn't  been  for  Jimmy  "Wal 
lace — Jimmy  with  his  talk  about  chorus-girls. 

The  trouble  with  that  profession,  Jimmy  had  said,  was  that 
the  indispensable  assets  in  it  were  not  industry,  intelligence, 
ambitions,  but  a  reasonably  presentable  pair  of  arms  and 
legs  (a  good-looking  face  would  surely  come  in  handy  too) 
and  a  rudimentary  sense  of  rhythm.  Another  demoralizing 
thing  about  it,  he  had  said,  was  the  fact  that  the  work  wasn't 
hard  enough,  except  during  rehearsal,  to  keep  its  votaries  out 
of  mischief. 

When  the  notion  first  occurred  to  her  that  these  statements 
of  .Jimmy's  might  some  day  have  an  interest  for  her  that  was 
personal  rather  than  academic,  she  had  dismissed  it  with  a 
shrug  of  good-humored  amusement.  It  wasn't  until  her  idea 
of  leaving  Rodney  and  going  out  and  making  a  living  and  a 
life  for  herself  had  hardened  into  a  fixed  resolution,  and  she 
had  begun  serious  consideration  of  ways  and  means,  that 
she  called  it  back  into  her  mind.  There  was  no  use  blinking  the 
facts.  The  one  marketable  asset  she  would  possess  when 
she  walked  out  of  her  husband's  house,  was  simply — how  she 
looked. 

Well  then,  if  that  was  all  you  had,  there  was  no  degrada 
tion  in  using  it  until  you  could  make  yourself  the  possessor 
of  something  else.  And  the  merit  of  this  particular  sort  of 
job,  for  her,  lay  precisely  in  the  thing  that  Jimmy  had  cited 
as  its  chief  disadvantage — it  left  you  abundant  leisure.  You 
might  occupy  that  leisure  getting  into  mischief — no  doubt 
most  chorus-girls  did.  But  there  was  nothing  to  prevent  your 
using  it  to  better  advantage. 

With  this  in  mind,  on  the  Sunday  before  Rose  went  away, 
she  had  studied  the  dramatic  section  of  the  morning  pa 
per  with  a  good  deal  of  care  and  was  rewarded  by  finding 


A   THOUSAND    YARDS  229 

among  the  news  notes,  an  item,  referring  to  a  new  musical 
comedy  that  was  to  be  produced  at  the  Globe  Theater  im 
mediately  after  the  Christmas  holidays.  The  Girl  Up-stairs 
was  the  title  of  it.  It  was  spoken  of  as  one  of  the  regular 
Globe  productions,  so  it  was  probable  that  Jimmy  Wallace's 
experience  with  the  production  of  an  earlier  number  in  the 
series  would  at  least  give  her  something  to  go  by.  The  thing 
must  be  in  rehearsal  now. 

Granted  that  she  was  going  to  be  a  chorus-girl  for  a  while, 
she  could  hardly  find  a  better  place  than  one  of  the  Globe  pro 
ductions  to  be  one  in.  According  to  Jimmy  Wallace,  it  was 
a  decent  enough  little  place,  and  yet  it  possessed  the  advan 
tage  of  being  spiritually  as  well  as  actually,  west  of  Clark 
Street.  Rodney's  friends  were  less  likely  to  go  there,  and  so 
have  a  chance  of  recognizing  her,  than  to  any  other  theater 
in  the  city,  barring  of  course  the  flagrantly  and  shamelessly 
vulgar  ones  of  the  purlieus. 

Among  her  older  friends  of  school  and  college  days,  the 
chances  were  of  course  worse.  But  even  if  she  were  seen  on 
the  stage  by  people  who  knew  her,  even  though  they  were  to 
say  to  each  other  that  that  girl  looked  surprisingly  like  Rose 
Aldrich,  this  would  be  a  very  different  thing  from  full  recogni 
tion.  She  would  be  well  protected  by  the  utter  unlikelihood  of 
her  being  in  such  a  place ;  by  the  absence  of  anybody's  knowl 
edge  that  she  had  flown  off  at  a  tangent  from  the  orbit  of 
Rodney's  world.  Then,  too,  she'd  be  somewhat  disguised  no 
doubt,  by  make-up.  Of  course  with  all  those  considerations 
weighed  at  their  full  value,  there  remained  a  risk  that  she 
would  be  fully  discovered  and  recognized.  But  it  was  a  risk 
that  couldn't  be  avoided,  whatever  she  did. 

She  entertained  for  a  while,  the  notion  of  taking  Jimmy 
Wallace  into  her  confidence — he  had  as  many  depositors  of 
confidences  on  his  books,  as  a  savings  bank,  and  he  was  just 
as  safe.  It  was  altogether  likely  that  he  could  get  her  a  job 
out  of  hand.  He  was  still  on  the  best  of  terms  with  the 
Globe  people,  and  he  was  a  really  influential  critic.  But 
even  if  he  didn't  get  her  a  job  outright,  he  could  at  least 
tell  her  how  to  set  about  getting  one  for  herself — where  to 


230  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

go,  whom  to  ask  for,  the  right  way  to  phrase  her  request, 
which  makes  such  an  enormous  difference  in  things  of  that 
kind. 

But  she  wasn't  long  in  abandoning  the  notion  of  appealing 
to  Jimmy  at  all.  The  corner-stone  of  her  new  adventure 
must  be  that  she  was  doing  things  for  herself;  that  she  was 
through  being  helped,  having  ways  smoothed  for  her,  things 
done  for  her.  If  she  owed  her  first  job  even  indirectly  to 
Jimmy,  all  the  rest  of  her  structure  would  be  out  of  plumb. 
Whatever  success  she  might  have  would  be  tainted  by  the 
misgiving  that  but  for  somebody  else's  help,  she  might  have 
failed.  Rose  Stanton  who  had  rented  that  three-dollar  room 
was  going  to  be  beholden  to  nobody  ! 

The  news  item  in  the  paper  gave  her  really  all  she  needed. 
It  told  her  that  a  production  was  in  rehearsal  and  it  men 
tioned  the  name  of  the  director,  John  Galbraith,  referring 
to  him  as  one  of  the  three  most  prominent  musical-comedy 
directors  in  the  country;  imported  from  New  York  at  vast 
expense,  to  make  this  production  unique  in  the  annals  of  the 
Globe,  and  so  forth. 

They  hadn't  rehearsed  Jimmy's  piece,  she  knew,  in  the 
theater  itself,  but  in  all  sorts  of  queer  out-of-the-way  places 
— in  theaters  that  happened  for  the  moment  to  be  "dark," 
in  dance-halls ;  pretty  much  anywhere.  This  was  because  there 
was  another  show  running  at  the  time  at  the  Globe.  She 
had  looked  in  the  theater  advertisements  to  see  whether  a 
show  was  running  there  now.  Yes,  there  was.  Well,  that 
gave  her  her  formula. 

When  she  asked  at  the  box  office  at  the  Globe  Theater, 
where  they  were  rehearsing  The  Girl  Up-stairs  to-day,  the 
nicely  manicured  young  man  inside,  answered  automatically, 
"North  End  Hall." 

Evidently  Jimmy  Wallace  couldn't  have  phrased  the  ques 
tion  better  himself.  But  the  quality  of  the  voice  that  asked 
it  had,  even  to  his  not  very  sensitive  ear,  an  unaccustomed 
flavor.  So,  almost  simultaneously  with  his  answer,  he  looked 
up  from  his  finger-nails  and  shot  an  inquiring  glance  through 
the  grille. 


A    THOUSAND    YAEDS  231 

What  he  saw  betrayed  him  into  an  involuntary  stare.  He 
didn't  mean  to  stare ;  he  meant  to  be  respectful.  But  he  was 
surprised.  Kose,  in  the  plainest  suit  that  she  could  hope  would 
seem  plausible  to  her  servants  for  a  traveling  costume  to 
California,  an  ulster  and  a  little  beaver  hat  with  a  quill  in  it, 
had  no  misgivings  about  looking  the  part  of  a  potentially 
hard-working  young  woman  renting  a  three-dollar  room  on 
North  Clark  Street  and  seeking  employment  in  a  musical- 
comedy  chorus.  A  realization  that  her  neat  black  seal  dressing- 
case  wasn't  quite  in  the  picture,  helped  to  account  for  the 
landlady's  puzzlement  about  her.  But  it  hadn't  been  intro 
duced  in  evidence  here.  And  yet  the  young  man  behind  the 
grille  seemed  as  surprised  as  the  landlady. 

He  repeated  his  answer  to  her  question  with  the  lubricant 
of  a  few  more  words  and  a  fatuous  sort  of  smile.  "I  believe 
they  rehearse  in  the  North  End  Hall  this  afternoon/' 

Eose  couldn't  help  smiling  a  little  herself.  "I'm  afraid," 
she  said,  "I'll  have  to  ask  where  that  is." 

"Not  at  all,"  said  the  young  man  idiotically,  and  he  told 
her  the  address;  then  cast  about  for  a  slip  of  paper  to  write 
it  down  on,  racking  his  thimbleful  of  brains  all  the  while  to 
make  out  who  she  could  be.  She  wasn't  one  of  the  principals 
in  the  company.  They'd  all  reported  and  he  hadn't  heard 
that  any  of  them  was  to  be  replaced. 

"Oh,  }rou  needn't  write  it,"  said  Rose.  "I  can  remember, 
thank  you."  She  gave  him  a  pleasant  sort  of  boyish  nod 
that  didn't  classify  at  all  with  anything  in  his  experience, 
and  walked  out  of  the  lobby. 

He  stared  after  her  almost  resentfully,  feeling  all  mussed 
up,  somehow,  and  inadequate ;  as  if  here  had  been  a  situation 
that  he  had  failed  signally  to  make  the  most  of.  He  sat  there 
for  the  next  half -hour  gloomily  thinking  up  things  he  might 
have  said  to  her. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  EVENING  AND  THE  MORNING  WERE  THE   FIRST  DAY 

WITH  her  umbrella  over  her  shoulder,  Eose  set  sail  north 
ward  again  through  the  rain,  absurdly  cheered;  first  by  the 
fact  that  the  opening  skirmish  had  distinctly,  though  in 
tangibly,  gone  her  way ;  secondly  by  the  small  bit  of  luck  that 
ISTorth  End  Hall  would  be,  judging  by  its  number  on  North 
Clark  Street,  not  more  than  a  block  or  two  from  her  three- 
dollar  room. 

The  sight  of  the  entrance  to  it  gave  her  a  pang  of  mis 
giving.  A  pair  of  white  painted  doors  opened  from  the 
street  level  upon  the  foot  of  a  broadish  stair  which  took 
you  up  rather  suddenly;  there  was  space  enough  between  the 
foot  of  the  stair  and  the  doors  for  a  ticket-window,  but  it  was 
too  small  to  be  called  a  lobby ;  an  arc  lamp  hung  there  though, 
and  two  more — all  three  were  extinct — hung  just  outside. 
What  gave  the  place  its  air  of  vulgarity,  a  suggestion  of  being 
the  starting  and  finishing  point  for  lewd,  drink  sodden  revels, 
she  couldn't  determine.  It  did  suggest  this  plainly.  But, 
in  the  light  of  what  Jimmy  Wallace  had  told  her,  she  didn't 
think  it  likely  there'd  be  any  reveling  to  speak  of  at  rehearsal. 

At  the  head  of  the  stairway,  tilted  back  in  a  kitchen  chair 
beneath  a  single  gas-jet  whose  light  he  was  trying  to  make 
suffice  for  the  perusal  of  a  green  newspaper,  sat  a  man,  under 
orders  no  doubt,  to  keep  intruders  away. 

Eose  cast  about  as  she  climbed  for  the  sort  of  phrase  that 
would  convince  him  she  wasn't  an  intruder.  She  would  ask 
him,  but  in  the  manner  of  one  who  seeks  a  formal  assurance 
merely,  if  this  was  where  they  were  rehearsing  The  Girl  Up 
stairs.  Three  steps  from  the  top>  she  changed  her  tactics,  as 
a  result  of  a  glance  at  his  unshaven  face.  The  thing  to  do  was 
to  go  by  as  if  he  weren't  there  at  all — as  if,  for  such  as  she, 

232 


THE    FIRST    DAY  233 

watchmen  didn't  exist.  The  rhythmic  pounding  of  feet  and 
the  frayed  chords  from  a  worn-out  piano,  convinced  her  she 
was  in  the  right  place. 

Her  stratagem  succeeded,  but  not  without  giving  her  a 
bad  moment.  The  man  glanced  up  and,  though  she  felt  he 
didn't  return  to  his  paper  again,  he  made  no  attempt  to  stop 
her.  But  right  before  her  was  another  pair  of  big  white  doors, 
closed  with  an  effect  of  permanence — locked,  she  suspected. 
A  narrower  door  to  the  left  stood  open,  but  over  it  was 
painted  the  disconcerting  legend  "Bar,"  flanked  on  either  side, 
to  make  the  matter  explicit  even  to  the  unlearned,  by  pictorial 
representations  of  glasses  of  foaming  beer.  She  hadn't  time 
to  deliberate  over  her  choice.  The  watchman's  eyes  were  bor 
ing  into  her  back.  If  she  chose  wrong,  or  if  she  visibly  hesi 
tated,  she  knew  she'd  hear  a  voice  say,  "Here!  Where  you 
going!" 

She  caught  a  quick  breath,  turned  to  the  left  and  walked 
steadily  through  the  narrower  door  into  the  bar.  It  proved  to 
be  a  deserted,  shrouded,  sinister-looking  place,  with  an  in 
terminable  high  mahogany  counter  at  one  side,  and  with  a  lot 
of  little  iron  tables  placed  by  pairs,  their  tops  together,  so 
that  half  of  them  had  their  legs  in  the  air.  Its  lights  were 
fled,  its  garlands  dead  all  right,  but  there  wasn't  anything 
poetic  about  it.  However,  there  was  another  open  door  at 
the  far  end  of  the  room,  through  which  sounds  and  light 
came  in.  And  the  watchman  hadn't  interfered  with  her. 
Evidently  she  had  chosen  right. 

She  paused  for  a  second  steadying  breath  before  she  went 
through  that  farther  door,  her  eyes  starry  with  resolution, 
her  cheeks,  just  for  the  moment,  a  little  pale.  If  the  compari 
son  suggests  itself  to  you  of  an  early  Christian  maiden  about 
to  step  out  into  an  arena  full  of  wild  beasts,  then  you  will 
have  mistaken  Rose.  The  arena  was  there,  true  enough.  But 
she  was  stepping  out  into  it  with  the  intention  of,  like 
Androcles,  taming  the  lion. 

The  room  was  hot  and  not  well  lighted — a  huge  square 
room  with  a  very  high  ceiling.  In  the  farther  wall  of  it  was  a 
proscenium  arch  and  a  raised  stage  somewhat  brighter  than 


234  THE   REAL   ADVENTUEE 

the  room  itself,  though  the  stained  brick  wall  at  the  back,  in 
the  absence  of  any  scenery,  absorbed  a  good  deal  of  the  light. 
On  the  stage,  right  and  left,  were  two  irregular  groups  of 
girls,  with  a  few  men,  awkwardly,  Eose  thought,  disposed 
among  them.  All  were  swaying  a  little  to  mark  the  rhythm 
of  the  music  industriously  pounded  out  by  a  sweaty  young 
man  at  the  piano — a  swarthy,  thick  young  man  in  his  under 
shirt.  There  were  a  few  more  people,  Eose  was  aware  without 
exactly  looking  at  any  of  them,  sprawled  in  different  parts 
of  the  hall,  on  sofas  or  cushioned  window-seats. 

It  was  all  a  little  vague  to  her  at  first,  because  her  atten 
tion  was  focused  on  a  single  figure — a  compact,  rather  slender 
figure,  and  tall,  Eose  thought — of  a  man  in  a  blue  serge  suit, 
who  stood  at  the  exact  center  of  the  stage  and  the  extreme 
edge  of  the  footlights.  He  was  counting  aloud  the  bars  of  the 
music — not  beating  time  at  all,  nor  yielding  to  the  rh3rthm  in 
any  way ;  standing,  on  the  contrary,  rather  tensely  still.  That 
was  the  quality  about  him,  indeed,  that  riveted  Eose's  atten 
tion  and  held  her  as  still  as  he  was,  in  the  doorway — an  ex 
hilarating  sort  of  intensity  that  had  communicated  itself  to 
the  swaying  groups  on  the  stage.  You  could  tell  from  the  way 
he  counted  that  something  was  gathering  itself  up,  get 
ting  ready  to  happen.  "Three  .  .  .  Four  .  .  .  Five 
.  .  .  Six  .  .  .  Seven  .  .  .  Now!"  he  shouted  on  the 
eighth  bar,  and  with  the  word,  one  of  the  groups  transformed 
itself.  One  of  the  men  bowed  to  one  of  the  girls  and  began 
waltzing  with  her;  another  couple  formed,  then  another. 

Eose  watched  breathlessly,  hoping  the  maneuver  wouldn't 
go  wrong; — for  no  reason  in  the  world  but  that  the  man, 
there  at  the  footlights,  was  so  tautly  determined  that  it 
shouldn't. 

Determination  triumphed.  The  number  was  concluded  to 
John  Galbraith's  evident  satisfaction.  "Very  good,"  he  said. 
"If  3Tou'll  all  do  exactly  what  you  did  that  time  from  now  on, 
I'll  not  complain."  Without  a  pause  he  went  on,  "Even-body 
on  the  stage — big  girls — all  the  big  girls!"  And,  to  the 
young  man  at  the  piano,  "We'll  do  Afternoon  Tea." 

There  was  a  momentary  pause  then,  filled  with  subdued 


THE    FIRST    DAY  335 

chatter,  while  the  girls  and  men  re-alined  themselves  for 
the  new  number — a  pause  taken  advantage  of  by  an  exceed 
ingly  blond  young  man  to  scramble  up  on  the  stage  and  make 
a  few  remarks  to  the  director.  He  was  the  musical  director, 
Rose  found  out  afterward.  Galbraith,  to  judge  from  his  atti 
tude,  gave  his  colleague's  remarks  about  twenty-five  per  cent, 
of  his  attention,  keeping  his  eye  all  the  while  on  the  chorus, 
to  see  that  they  got  their  initial  formation  correctly. 

Rose  looked  them  over,  too.  The  girls  weren't,  on  an  aver 
age,  extravagantly  beautiful,  though,  with  the  added  charm 
of  make-up  allowed  for,  there  were  no  doubt  many  the  audi 
ences  would  consider  so.  "What  struck  Rose  most  emphatically 
about  them,  was  their  youth  and  spirit.  How  long  they  had 
been  rehearsing  this  afternoon  she  didn't  know.  But  now, 
when  they  might  have  gone  slack  and  silent,  they  pranced 
and  giggled  instead  and  showed  a  disposition  to  lark  about, 
which  evidently  would  have  carried  them  a  good  deal  further 
but  for  the  restraining  presence  of  the  director.  They  were 
dressed  in  pretty  much  anything  that  would  allow  perfect 
freedom  to  their  bodies ;  especially  their  arms  and  legs ;  bath 
ing  suits  mostly,  or  middy-blouses  and  bloomers.  Rose  noted 
this  with  satisfaction.  Her  old  university  gymnasium  cos 
tume  would  do  perfectly.  Anything,  apparently,  would  do, 
because  as  her  eye  adjusted  itself  to  details,  she  discovered 
romper  suits,  pinafores,  chemises,  overalls — all  equally  taken 
for  granted.  There  weren't  nearly  so  many  chorus  men  as 
girls.  She  couldn't  be  sure  just  how  many  there  were,  because 
they  couldn't  be  singled  out.  As  they  wore  no  distinctly 
working  costume,  merely  took  off  their  coats,  waistcoats  and 
collars,  they  weren't  distinguishable  from  most  of  the  staff, 
who,  with  the  exception  of  the  director,  garbed  themselves 
likewise. 

Galbraith  dismissed  the  musical  director  with  a  nod,  struck 
his  hands  together  for  silence,  and  scrutinized  the  now  mo 
tionless  group  on  the  stage. 

"We're  one  shy,"  he  said.  "Who's  missing?"  And  then 
answered  his  own  question:  "Grant!"  He  wheeled  around 
and  his  eyes  searched  the  hall. 


236  THE   REAL   ADVEXTURE 

Rose  became  aware  for  the  first  time,  that  a  mutter  of  con 
versation  had  been  going  on  incessantly  since  she  had  come 
in,  in  one  of  the  recessed  window-seats  behind  her.  Now, 
when  Galbraith's  gaze  plunged  in  that  direction,  she  turned 
and  looked  too.  A  big  blonde  chorus-girl  was  in  there  with 
a  man,  a  girl,  who,  with  twenty  pounds  trained  off  her,  and 
that  sulky  look  out  of  her  face,  would  have  been  a  beauty. 
She  had  roused  herself  with  a  sort  of  defiant  deliberation  at 
the  sound  of  the  director's  voice,  but  she  still  had  her  back 
to  him  and  went  on  talking  to  the  man. 

"Grant !"  said  John  Galbraith  again,  and  this  time  his 
voice  had  a  cutting  edge.  "Will  you  take  your  place  on  the 
stage,  or  shall  I  suspend  rehearsal  until  you're  ready?" 

For  answer  she  turned  and  began  walking  slowly  across  the 
room  toward  the  door  in  the  proscenium  that  led  to  the 
stage.  She  started  walking  slowly,  but  under  Galbraith's  eye, 
she  quickened  her  pace,  involuntarily,  it  seemed,  until  it  was  a 
ludicrous  sort  of  run.  Presently  she  emerged  on  the  stage, 
looking  rather  artificially  unconcerned,  and  the  rehearsal 
went  on  again. 

But  just  before  he  gave  the  signal  to  the  pianist  to  go 
ahead,  Galbraith  with  a  nod  summoned  a  young  man  from 
the  wings  and  said  something  to  him,  whereupon,  clearly 
carrying  out  his  orders,  he  vaulted  down  from  the  stage  and 
came  walking  toward  the  doorway  where  Rose  was  still  stand 
ing.  The  director's  gaze  as  it  flashed  about  the  hall,  had  evi 
dently  discovered  more  than  the  sulky  chorus-girl. 

The  young  man  wasn't  intrinsically  formidable — a  rather 
limp,  deprecatory  sort,  he  looked.  But,  as  an  emissary  from 
Galbraith,  he  quickened  Rose's  heart-beat  a  trifle.  She  smiled 
though  as  she  made  a  small  bet  with  herself  that  he  wouldn't 
be  able  to  turn  her  out,  even  in  his  capacity  of  envoy. 

But  he  didn't  come  straight  to  Rose;  deflected  his  course 
a  little  uncertainly,  and  brought  up  before  a  woman  who  sat 
in  a  folding  chair  a  little  farther  along  the  wall. 

Rose  hadn't  observed  her  particularly  before,  though  she 
was  aware  that  one  of  the  "big  girls"  who  had  responded 
promptly  to  Galbraith's  first  call  for  them,  had  been  talking 


THE    FIRST    DAY  237 

to  her  when  Rose  came  in,  and  she  had  assumed  her  to  be 
somebody  connected  with  the  show;  at  least  with  an  unchal 
lengeable  right  to  watch  its  rehearsals.  But  she  had  corrected 
this  impression  even  before  she  had  heard  what  John  Gal- 
braith's  assistant  said  to  the  woman  and  what  she  said  to 
him;  for  she  drew  herself  defensively  erect  when  she  saw 
him  turn  toward  her,  assumed  a  look  of  calculated  disdain; 
tapped  a  foot  inadequately  shod  for  Chicago's  pavements  in 
December,  although  evidently  it  had  experienced  them— gave, 
on  the  whole,  as  well  as  she  could,  an  imitation  of  a  duchess 
being  kept  waiting. 

But  the  limp  young  man  didn't  seem  disconcerted,  and  in 
quired  in  so  many  words,  what  her  business  was.  The  duchess 
said  in  a  harsh  high  voice  with  a  good  deal  of  inflection  to 
it,  that  she  wanted  to  see  the  director ;  a  very  partic'lar  friend 
of  his,  she  assured  the  young  man,  had  begged  her  to  do  so. 

"You'll  have  to  wait  till  he's  through  rehearsing,"  said  the 
young  man,  and  then  he  came  over  to  Rose. 

The  vestiges  of  the  smile  the  duchess  had  provoked  were 
still  visible  about  her  mouth  when  he  came  up.  "May  I  wait 
and  see  Mr.  Galbraith  after  the  rehearsal  ?"  she  asked.  "If  I 
won't  be  in  the  way?" 

"Sure,"  said  the  young  man.  "He  won't  be  long  now.  He's 
been  rehearsing  since  two."  Then,  rather  explosively,  "Have 
a  chair." 

He  struck  Rose  as  being  a  little  flustered  and  uncertain, 
somehow,  and  he  now  made  a  tentative  beginning  of  actually 
bringing  a  chair  for  her. 

"Oh,  don't  bother,"  said  Rose,  and  now  she  couldn't  help 
smiling  outright.  "I'll  find  one  for  myself." 

But,  whenever  he  had  begun  rehearsing,  it  was  evident  that 
John  Galbraith  didn't  mean  to  stop  until  he  got  througb,  and 
it  was  a  long  hour  that  Rose  sat  there  in  a  little  folding 
chair  similar  to  the  one  occupied  by  the  duchess;  an  hour 
which,  in  spite  of  all  her  will  could  do,  took  some  of  the 
crispness  out  of  her  courage.  It  was  all  very  well  to  reflect 
with  pitying  amusement  on  the  absurdities  of  the  duchess. 
But  it  was  evident  the  duchess  was  waiting  with  a  purpose  like 


238  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

her  own.  She  meant  to  get  a  job  in  the  chorus.  Her  rather 
touching  ridiculousness  as  a  human  being  wouldn't  stand  in 
her  way.  It  was  likely  that  she  had  had  dozens  of  jobs  in 
choruses  before,  knew  exactly  what  would  be  wanted  of  her, 
and  was  confident  of  her  ability  to  deliver  it. 

As  Rose's  heart  sank  lower  with  the  dragging  minutes  she 
even  took  into  account  the  possibility  that  the  duchess  had 
spoken  the  truth  about  John  Galbraith's  "partic'lar  friend." 
Just  the  mention  of  a  name  might  settle  the  whole  business. 
Then  her  spirits  went  down  another  five  degrees.  Here  she 
had  been  assuming  all  along  that  there  was  a  job  for  either 
of  them  to  get !  But  it  was  quite  likely  there  was  not.  The 
chorus  looked  complete  enough;  there  was  no  visible  gap  in 
the  ranks  crying  aloud  for  a  recruit. 

When  at  last,  a  little  after  six  o'clock,  Galbraith  said, 
"Quarter  to  eight,  everybody,"  and  dismissed  them  with  a 
nod  for  a  scurry  to  what  were  evidently  dressing-rooms  at 
the  other  side  of  the  hall,  the  ship  of  Rose's  hopes  had  utterly 
gone  to  pieces.  She  had  a  plank  to  keep  herself  afloat  on. 
It  was  the  determination  to  stay  there  until  he  should  tell 
her  in  so  many  words  that  he  hadn't  any  use  for  her  and  un 
der  no  conceivable  circumstances  ever  would  have. 

The  deprecatory  young  man  was  talking  to  him  now,  about 
her  and  the  duchess  evidently,  for  he  peered  out  into  the  hall 
to  see  if  they  were  still  there;  then  vaulted  down  from  the 
stage  and  came  toward  them. 

The  duchess  got  up,  and  with  a  good  deal  of  manner,  went 
over  to  meet  him.  Rose  felt  outmaneuvered  here.  She  should 
have  gone  to  meet  him  herself,  but  a  momentary  paralysis 
kept  her  in  her  chair.  She  didn't  hear  what  the  duchess 
said.  The  manner  of  it  was  confidential,  in  marked  protest 
against  the  proximity  of  a  handful  of  other  people — the 
blond  musical  director,  the  thick  pianist  in  his  undershirt, 
a  baby-faced  man  in  round  tortoise-shell  spectacles,  three  or 
four  of  the  chorus  people,  each  of  whom  had  serious  matters 
to  bring  before  the  director's  attention. 

But  all  the  confidences,  it  seemed,  were  on  the  side  of  the 
duchess.  Because,  when  John  Galbraith  answered  her,  his 


'I    want   a    iol>  in   the  churns. 


THE    FIRST    DAY  239 

voice  easily  filled  the  room.  "You  tell  Mr.  Pike,  if  that's  his 
name,  that  I'm  very  much  obliged  to  him,  but  we  haven't  any 
vacancies  in  the  chorus  at  present.  If  you  care  to,  leave  your 
name  and  address  with  Mr.  Quan,  the  assistant  stage  man 
ager  ;  then  if  we  find  we  need  you,  we  can  let  you  know." 

He  said  it  not  unkindly,  but  he  exercised  some  power  of 
making  it  evident  that  as  he  finished  speaking,  the  duchess, 
for  him,  simply  ceased  to  exist.  Anything  she  might  say  or 
do  thereafter,  would  be  so  much  effort  utterly  wasted. 

The  duchess  drew  herself  up  and  walked  away. 

And  Rose?  "Well,  the  one  thing  she  wanted  passionately 
to  do  just  then,  was  to  walk  away  herself  out  of  that  squalid 
horrible  room;  to  soften  her  own  defeat  by  evading  the  final 
sledge-hammer  blow.  "What  he  had  said  to  the  duchess  li 
censed  her  to  do  so.  If  there  were  no  vacancies  .  .  .  But 
she  clenched  her  hands,  set  her  teeth,  pulled  in  a  long  breath, 
and  somehow,  set  herself  in  motion.  Not  toward  the  door, 
but  toward  where  John  Galbraith  was  standing. 

But  before  she  could  get  over  to  him,  the  pianist  and  the 
musical  director  had  got  his  attention.  So  she  waited  quietly 
beside  him  for  two  of  the  longest  minutes  that  ever  were 
ticked  off  by  a  clock.  Then,  with  disconcerting  suddenness, 
right  in  the  middle  of  one  of  the  musical  director's  sentences, 
he  looked  straight  into  her  face  and  said:  "What  do  you 
want?" 

She'd  thought  him  tall,  but  he  wasn't.  He  was  looking  on 
a  perfect  level  into  her  eyes. 

"I  want  a  job  in  the  chorus,"  said  Rose. 

"You  heard  what  I  said  to  that  other  woman,  I  suppose  ?" 

"Yes,"  said  Rose,  "but      .     .     ." 

"But  you  thought  you'd  let  me  say  it  to  you  again." 

"Yes,"  she  said.  And,  queerly  enough,  she  felt  her  courage 
coming  back.  She  managed  the  last  "yes"  very  steadily.  It 
had  occurred  to  her  that  if  he'd  wanted  merely  to  get  rid  of 
her,  he  could  have  done  it  quicker  than  this.  He  was  looking 
her  over  now  with  a  coolly  appraising  eye. 

"What  professional  experience  have  you  had?"  he  asked. 

"I  haven't  had  any." 


240  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

He  almost  smiled  when  she  stopped  there. 

"Any  amateur  experience?"  he  inquired. 

"Quite  a  lot,"  said  Rose ;  "pageants  and  things,  and  two  or 
three  little  plays/' 

"Can  you  dance?" 

"Yes,"  said  Rose. 

He  said  he  supposed  ballroom  dancing  was  what  she  meant, 
whereupon  she  told  him  she  was  a  pretty  good  ballroom 
dancer,  but  that  it  was  gymnastic  dancing  she  had  had  in 
mind. 

"All  right,"  he  said.  "See  if  you  can  do  this.  "Watch  me, 
and  then  imitate  me  exactly." 

In  the  intensity  of  her  absorption  in  his  questions  and  her 
own  answers  to  them,  she  had  never  given  a  thought  to  the 
bystanders.  But  now  as  they  fell  back  to  give  him  room,  she 
swept  a  glance  across  their  faces.  They  all  wore  smiles  of 
sorts.  There  was  something  amusing  about  this — something 
out  of  the  regular  routine.  A  little  knot  of  chorus-girls 
halted  in  the  act  of  going  out  the  wide  doors  and  stood  watch 
ing.  "Was  it  just  a  hoax?  The  suppressed  unnatural  silence 
sounded  like  it.  But  at  what  John  Galbraith  did,  one  of  the 
b}rstanders  guffawed  outright. 

It  wasn't  pretty,  the  dance  step  he  executed — a  sort  of 
stiff-legged  skip  accompanied  by  a  vulgar  hip  wriggle  and 
concluding  with  a  straight-out  sidewise  kick. 

A  sick  disgust  clutched  at  Rose  as  she  watched — an  utter 
revulsion  from  the  whole  loathly  business.  She  could  scrub 
floors — starve  if  she  had  to.  She  couldn't  do  the  thing  he  de 
manded  of  her  here  out  in  the  middle  of  the  floor,  in  her 
street  clothes,  without  the  excuse  of  music  to  make  it  toler 
able — and  before  that  row  of  leering  faces. 

"Well?"  he  asked,  turning  to  her  as  he  finished.  He 
wasn't  smiling  at  all. 

"I'm  not  dressed  to  do  that,"  she  said. 

"I  know  you're  not,"  he  admitted  coolly,  "but  it  can  be 
done.  Pick  up  your  skirts  and  do  it  as  you  are, — if  you  really 
want  a  job." 

There  was  just  a  faint  edge  of  contempt  in  that  last  phrase 


THE    FIRST    DAY  241 

and,  mercifully,  it  roused  her  anger.  A  blaze  kindled  in  her 
blue  eyes,  and  two  spots  of  vivid  color  defined  themselves  in 
her  cheeks. 

She  caught  up  her  skirts  as  he  had  told  her  to  do,  executed 
without  compromise  the  stiff-legged  skip  and  the  wriggle,  and 
finished  with  a  horizontal  sidewise  kick  that  matched  his  own. 
Then,  panting,  trembling  a  little,  she  stood  looking  straight 
into- his  face. 

The  first  thing  she  realized  when  the  processes  of  thought 
began  again  was  that  even  if  there  had  been  a  hoax,  she  was 
not,  in  the  event,  the  victim  of  it.  The  attitude  of  her  audi 
ence  told  her  that.  Galbraith  was  staring  at  her  with  a  look 
that  expressed  at  first,  clear  astonishment,  but  gradually  com 
plicated  itself  with  other  emotions — confusion,  a  glint  of 
whimsical  amusement.  That  gleam,  a  perfectly  honest,  kindly 
one,  decided  Rose  to  take  him  on  trust.  He  wasn't  a  brute, 
however  it  might  suit  his  purposes  to  act  like  one.  And  vrith 
an  inkling  of  how  her  blaze  of  wrath  must  be  amusing  him, 
she  smiled  slowly  and  a  little  uncertainly,  herself. 

"We've  been  rehearsing  this  piece  two  weeks,"  he  said  pres 
ently,  looking  away  from  her  when  he  began  to  talk,  "and  I 
couldn't  take  any  one  into  the  chorus  now  whom  I'd  have  to 
teach  the  rudiments  of  dancing  to.  I  must  have  people  who 
can  do  what  I  tell  them.  That's  why  a  test  was  necessary. 
Also,  from  now  on,  it  would  be  a  serious  thing  to  lose  anybody 
out  of  the  chorus.  I  couldn't  take  anybody  who  had  come 
down  here — for  a  lark." 

"It's  not  a  lark  to  me,"  said  Rose. 

Now  he  looked  around  at  her  again.  "I  know  it  isn't,"  he 
said.  "But  I  thought  when  you  first  came  in  here,  that  it 
was." 

With  that,  Rose  understood  the  whole  thing.  It  was  evi 
dently  a  fact  that  despite  the  plain  little  suit,  the  beaver  hat, 
the  rough  ulster  she  was  wearing,  she  didn't  look  like  the 
sort  of  girl  who  had  to  rely  on  getting  a  job  in  the  chorus 
for  keeping  a  roof  over  her  head.  Looks,  speech,  manner — 
everything  segregated  her  from  the  type.  It  was  all  obvious 
enough,  only  Rose  hadn't  happened  to  think  of  it.  It  ac- 


242  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

counted,  of  course,  for  the  rather  odd  way  in  which  the  land 
lady,  the  ticket-seller  at  the  Globe,  and  meek  little  Mr.  Quan, 
the  assistant  stage  manager,  all  had  looked  at  her,  as  at  some 
one  they  couldn't  classify.  John  Galbraith,  out  of  a  wider 
experience  of  life,  had  classified  her,  or  thought  he  had,  as  a 
well-bred  young  girl  who,  in  a  moment  of  pique,  or  mischief, 
had  decided  it  would  be  fun  to  go  on  the  stage.  The  test  he 
had  applied  wasn't,  from  that  point  of  view,  unnecessarily 
cruel.  The  girl  he  had  taken  her  for,  would,  on  being  or 
dered  to  repeat  that  grotesque  bit  of  vulgarity  of  his,  have 
drawn  her  dignity  about  her  like  a  cloak,  and  gone  back  in 
a  chastened  spirit  to  the  world  where  she  belonged. 

A  gorgeous  apparition  came  sweeping  by  them  just  now, 
on  a  line  from  the  dressing-room  to  the  door — a  figure  that, 
with  regal  deliberation,  was  closing  a  blue  broadcloth  coat, 
trimmed  with  sable,  over  an  authentic  Callot  frock.  The 
Georgette  hat  on  top  of  it  was  one  that  Rose  had  last  seen  in 
a  Michigan  Avenue  shop.  She  had  amused  herself  by  trying 
to  vizualize  the  sort  of  person  who  ought  to  buy  it.  It  had 
found  its  proper  buyer  at  last — fulfilled  its  destiny. 

"Oh,  Grant !"  said  John  Galbraith. 

The  queenly  creature  stopped  short  and  Rose  recognized 
her  with  a  jump,  as  the  sulky  chorus-girl.  Dressed  like  this, 
her  twenty  pounds  of  surplus  fat  didn't  show. 

Galbraith  walked  over  to  her.  "I  shan't  need  you  any 
more,  Grant."  He  spoke  in  a  quiet  impersonal  sort  of  way, 
but  his  voice  had,  as  always,  a  good  deal  of  carrying  power. 
"It's  hardly  worth  your  while  trying  to  work,  I  suppose, 
when  you're  so  prosperous  as  this.  And  it  isn't  worth  my 
while  to  have  you  soldiering.  You  needn't  report  again." 

He  nodded  not  unamiably,  and  turned  away.  Evidently 
she  had  ceased  to  exist  for  him  as  completely  as  the  duchess. 
She  glared  after  him  and  called  out  in  a  hoarse  throaty  voice, 
"Thank  Gawd  I  don't  have  to  work  for  you." 

He'd  come  back  to  Eose  again  by  this  time,  and  she  saw 
him  smile.  "When  you  do  it,"  he  said  over  his  shoulder, 
"thank  Him  for  me  too."  Then  to  Rose:  "She's  a  valuable 
girl ;  had  lots  of  experience ;  good-looking ;  audiences  like  her. 


THE    FIRST    DAY  243 

I'm  giving  you  her  place  because  as  long  as  she's  got  those 
clothes  and  the  use  of  a  limousine,  she  won't  get  down  to 
business.  I'd  rather  have  a  green  recruit  who  will.  I'm  hir 
ing  you  because  I  think  you  will  be  able  to  understand  that 
what  you  feel  like  doing  isn't  important  and  that  what  I  tell 
you  to  do  is.  The  next  rehearsal  is  at  a  quarter  to  eight  to 
night.  Give  your  name  and  address  to  Mr.  Quan  before  you 
go.  By  the  way,  what  is  your  name  ?" 

"Rose  Stanton,"  she  said.  "But  .  .  ."  She  had  to  fol 
low  him  a  step  or  two  because  he  had  already  turned  away. 
"But,  may  I  give  some  other  name  than  that  to  Mr.  Quan  ?" 

He  frowned  a  little  dubiously  and  asked  her  how  old  she 
was.  And  even  when  she  told  him  twenty-two,  he  didn't  look 
altogether  reassured. 

"That's  the  truth,  is  it?  I  mean,  there's  nobody  who  can 
come  down  here  about  three  days  before  we  open  and  call  me 
a  kidnaper,  and  lead  you  away  by  the  ear?" 

"No,"  said  Rose  gravely,  "there's  no  one  who'll  do  that." 

"Very  good,"  he  said.   "Tell  Quan  any  name  you  like." 

The  name  she  did  tell  him  was  Doris  Dane. 

It  was  a  quarter  to  seven  when  she  came  out  through  the 
white  doors  into  North  Clark  Street.  The  thing  that  woke 
her  out  of  a  sort  of  daze  as  she  trudged  along  toward  her 
room  in  the  unrelenting  rain  was  a  pleasurable  smell  of  fried 
onions ;  whereupon  she  realized  that  she  was  legitimately  and 
magnificently  hungry.  In  any  other  condition,  the  dingy 
little  lunch-room  she  presently  turned  into,  would  hardly 
have  invited  her.  But  the  spots  on  the  frayed  starchy  table 
cloth,  the  streakiness  of  the  glasses,  the  necessity  of  polishing 
knife  and  fork  upon  her  damp  napkin,  couldn't  prevent  her 
doing  ample  justice  to  a  small  thick  platter  of  ham  and  eggs, 
and  a  plate  of  thicker  wheat-cakes. 

It  occurred  to  her  as  she  finished,  that  a  quarter  to  eight 
probably  meant  the  hour  at  which  the  rehearsal  was  to  begin. 
She'd  have  to  be  back  at  the  hall  at  least  fifteen  minutes 
earlier,  in  order  to  be  dressed  and  ready.  She  had  no  time  to 
waste;  would  even  have  to  hurry  a  little. 

She  didn't  try  to  explore  for  the  reason  why  this  discovery 


244  THE    REAL   ADVENTUBE 

pleased  her  so  much.  It  was  enough  that  it  did.  She  flew 
along  through  the  rain  to  her  tunnel,  charged  up  the  narrow 
stair,  and  in  the  unlighted  corridor  outside  her  room,  collided 
with  her  trunk.  Well,  it  was  lucky  it  had  come  anyway.  She 
tugged  it  into  her  room  after  she  had  lighted  the  gas. 

You  might  have  seen,  if  you  had  been  there  to  see,  just  a 
momentary  hesitation  after  she'd  got  her  trunk  key  out  of 
her  purse  before  she  unlocked  it.  It  was  a  sort  of  Jack-in- 
the-box,  that  trunk.  Would  the  emotions  with  which  she'd 
packed  it,  spring  out  and  clutch  her  as  she  released  the  hasp  ? 
The  saving  factor  in  the  situation  was  that  it  was  a  quarter 
past  seven.  In  fifteen  minutes  she  must  be  back  at  North 
End  Hall,  getting  ready  to  go  to  work  at  her  job.  Suppose 
she  hadn't  found  a  job  this  afternoon?  The  thought  turned 
her  giddy. 

She  plunged  into  her  trunk,  rummaged  out  a  middy-blouse, 
a  pair  of  black  silk  bloomers,  and  her  gymnasium .  sneakers, 
rolled  them  all  together  in  a  bundle,  got  into  her  rubbers  and 
her  ulster  again,  and — I'm  afraid  there  is  no  other  word  for 
it— fled. 

She  was  one  of  the  first  of  the  chorus  to  reach  the  hall  and 
she  had  nearly  finished  putting  on  her  working  clothes  before 
the  rest  of  them  came  pelting  in.  But  she  didn't  get  out 
quickly  enough  to  miss  the  sensation  that  was  exciting  them 
all — the  news  that  Grant  had  been  dropped.  A  few  of  them 
were  indignant;  the  rest  merely  curious.  The  indignant  ones 
allowed  themselves  a  license  in  the  expression  of  this  feeling 
that  positively  staggered  Eose;  made  use  in  a  quite  matter- 
of-fact  way  of  words  she  had  supposed  even  a  drunken  truck 
man  would  have  attempted  to  refrain  from  in  the  presence  of 
a  woman.  She  made  a  discovery  afterward,  that  there  were 
many  girls  in  the  chorus  who  never  talked  like  that;  and 
among  those  who  did,  the  further  distinction  between  those 
who  used  vile  language  casually,  or  even  jocularly,  and  those 
who  were  driven  to  it  only  by  anger.  But  for  these  first  few 
minutes  in  the  dressing-room,  she  felt  as  if  she  had  blundered 
into  some  foul  pit  abysmally  below  the  lowest  level  of  de 
cency. 


THE   EIEST   DAY  245 

One  of  the  girls  advanced  the  theory  that  Grant  hadn't 
finally  been  dropped ;  it  was  absurd  that  she  should  be.  She 
was  one  of  the  most  popular  chorus-girls  in  Chicago.  The  di 
rector  was  merely  trying  to  scare  her  into  doing  better  work 
for  him.  She'd  come  back,  all  right.  She  had  reasons  of  her 
own,  this  girl  intimated,  for  wanting  to  work,  despite  the  pos 
session  of  French  clothes  and  the  use  of  a  limousine.  Her 
"friend,"  it  seemed,  needed  to  be  taught  some  sort  of  lesson. 
Grant  would  come  around  before  to-morrow  night,  and  eat 
enough  humble  pie  to  induce  Galbraith  to  take  her  back. 

If  this  theory  were  sound,  and  it  had  a  dreadful  plausibil 
ity  to  Eose,  her  only  chance  for  keeping  her  job  would  be 
to  do  as  well  as  Grant  could  do,  to-night,  in  this  very  first  re 
hearsal  ;  and  she  went  out  on  the  stage  in  a  perfect  agony  of 
determination.  She  must  see  everything,  hear  everything; 
put  all  she  knew  and  every  ounce  of  energy  she  had,  into  the 
endeavor  to  make  John  Galbraith  forget  that  she  was  a  re 
cruit  at  all. 

The  intensity  of  this  preoccupation  was  a  wonderful  pro 
tection  to  her.  It  kept  away  the  sick  disgust  that  had  threat 
ened  her  in  the  dressing-room;  prevented  her  even  glancing 
ahead  to  a  future  that  would,  had  she  taken  to  guessing  about 
it,  utterly  have  overwhelmed  her.  The  intensely  illuminated 
present  instant  kept  her  mind  focused  to  its  sharpest  edge. 

It  is  true  that  before  she  had  been  working  fifteen  minutes, 
she  had  forgotten  all  about  Grant  and  the  possibility  of  her 
return.  She'd  even  forgotten  her  resolution  not  to  let  John 
Galbraith  remember  she  was  a  recruit.  Indeed,  she  had  for 
gotten  she  was  a  recruit.  She  was  nothing  at  all  but  just  a 
reflection  of  his  will.  She'd  felt  that  quality  strongly  in  him 
even  behind  his  back  during  the  afternoon  rehearsal.  Now, 
on  the  stage  in  front  of  him,  she  was  completely  possessed 
by  it. 

She  didn't  know  she  was  tired,  panting,  wet  all  over  with 
sweat.  Really,  of  course,  she  was  pretty  soft,  judged  by  her 
own  athletic  standards.  She  hadn't  done  anything  so  physi 
cally  exacting  as  this  for  over  a  year.  But  she  had  the  illu 
sion  that  she  wasn't  doing  anything  now;  that  she  was  just 


246  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

a  passive  plastic  thing,  tossed,  flung,  swirled  about  by  the 
driving  power  of  the  director's  will.  It  wouldn't  have  sur 
prised  her  if  the  chairs  had  danced  for  him. 

It  couldn't  of  course  have  occurred  to  her  that  she  was  pro 
ducing  her  own  effect  on  the  director;  she  couldn't  have 
surmised  that  he  was  driving  his  rehearsal  at  a  faster  pace 
and  with  a  renewed  energy  and  fire  because  of  the  presence, 
there  in  the  ranks  of  his  chorus,  of  a  glowing,  thrilling  crea 
ture  who  devoured  his  intentions  half  formed,  met  them  with 
a  blue  spark  across  the  poles  of  their  two  minds. 

She  realized,  when  the  rehearsal  was  over,  that  it  had  gone 
well  and  that  it  couldn't  have  gone  so  if  her  own  part  had 
been  done  badly.  She  hesitated  a  moment  after  he'd  finally 
dismissed  them  with  a  nod,  and  an,  "Eleven  o'clock  to-mor 
row  morning,  everybody,"  from  a  previously  formed  intention 
of  asking  him  if  she'd  do.  But  she  felt,  somehow,  that  such 
a  question  would  be  foolish  and  unnecessary. 

He  had  marked  her  hesitation  and  shot  her  a  look  that  she 
felt  followed  her  as  she  walked  off,  and  she  heard  him  say  to 
the  world  in  general  and  in  a  heartfelt  sort  of  way,  "Good 
God !"  But  she  didn't  know  that  it  was  the  highest  encomium 
he  was  capable  of,  nor  that  it  was  addressed  to  her. 

She  carried  away,  however,  a  glow  that  saw  her  back  to  her 
room,  and  through  the  processes  of  unpacking  and  getting 
ready  for  bed,  though  it  faded  swiftly  during  the  last  of  these. 
But  when  the  last  thing  that  she  could  think  of  to  do  had 
been  done,  when  there  was  no  other  pretext,  even  after  a  des 
perate  search  for  one,  that  could  be  used  to  postpone  turning 
out  her  light  and  getting  into  bed,  she  had  to  confess  to  her 
self  that  she  was  afraid  to  do  it.  And  with  that  confession, 
the  whole  pack  of  hobgoblin  terrors  she  had  kept  at  bay  BO 
valiantly  since  shutting  her  husband's  door  behind  her,  were 
upon  her  back. 

Here  she  was,  Rose  Aldrich,  in  a  three-dollar-a-week  room 
on  Xorth  Clark  Street,  having  deserted  her  husband  and  her 
babies — a  loving  honest  husband,  and  a  pair  of  helpless  babies 
not  yet  three  months  old — to  become  a  member  of  the  chorus 
in  a  show  called  The  Girl  Up-stairs!  Was  there  a  human  be- 


THE    FIEST    DAY  247 

mg  in  the  •world,  except  herself,  who  would  not,  as  the  most 
charitable  of  possible  explanations,  assume  her  to  be  mad? 
Could  she  herself,  seeing  her  act  cut  out  in  silhouette  like 
that,  be  sure  she  wasn't  mad?  Hysterical  anyway,  the  vic 
tim  of  her  own  rashly  encouraged  fancies,  just  as  Rodney  had 
so  often  declared  she  was?  Oughtn't  she  to  have  let  James 
Randolph  explore  the  subconscious  part  of  her  mind  and  find 
the  crack  there  must  he  in  it,  that  could  have  driven  her  to 
a  crazy  act  like  this  ? 

It  didn't  matter  now.  She  couldn't  go  back.  She  never 
could  go  back  after  the  things  she  had  said  to  Rodney,  until 
she  had  made  good  those  fantastic  theories  of  hers.  Probably 
he  wouldn't  want  her  to  come  back  even  then.  He'd  find  out 
where  she  was  of  course — what  she  was  doing.  Why  had  she 
been  such  a  fool,  going  away,  as  not  to  have  gone  far  enough 
to  be  safe  ?  He'd  feel  that  she'd  disgraced  him.  Any  man 
would.  And  he'd  never  forgive  her.  He'd  divorce  her,  per 
haps.  He'd  have  a  right  to,  if  she  stayed  away  long  enough. 
And,  without  her  there,  with  nothing  of  her  but  memories — 
tormenting  memories,  he'd  perhaps  fall  in  love  with  some  one 
else — marry  some  one  else.  And  her  two  babies  would  call 
that  unknown  some  one  "mother."  She  must  have  been  crazy ! 
She'd  thought  she  didn't  love  them.  That  had  been  a  delu 
sion  anyway.  Her  heart  ached  for  them  now — an  actual  phys 
ical  ache  that  almost  made  her  cry  out  And  for  Rodney  him 
self,  for  his  big  strong  arms  around  her!  Would  she  ever 
feel  them  again? 

She  told  herself  this  was  a  nightmare — something  to  be 
fought  off,  kept  at  bay.  But  how  did  that  help  her  now,  when 
the  armor  must  be  laid  aside?  Sometime  or  other  she  must 
turn  out  that  light  and  lie  down  in  that  bed,  defenseless.  She 
had  never  in  her  life  asked  more  of  her  courage  than  when, 
at  last,  she  did  that  thing.  There  were  nine  hours  then  ahead 
of  her  before  eleven  o'clock  and  the  next  rehearsal. 


CHAPTEE  III 

BOSE   KEEPS   THE   PATH 

ROSE  rehearsed  twice  a  day  for  a  solid  week  without  form 
ing  the  faintest  conception  of  who  "the  girl"  was  or  why  she 
was  "the  girl  up-stairs."  She  didn't  know  what  sort  of  scene 
it  was  for  instance  that  they  burst  in  on  through  the  space 
marked  by  two  of  the  little  folding  chairs  brought  up  from 
the  floor  of  the  dance-hall  for  the  purpose.  The  group  of 
iron  tables  borrowed  from  the  bar  and  set  solidly  together  in 
the  upper  right-hand  corner  of  the  stage  whenever  they  re 
hearsed  a  certain  one  of  their  song  numbers,  might  with  equal 
plausibility  represent  a  mountain  in  Arizona,  the  front  ve 
randa  of  a  house  or  a  banquet  table  in  the  gilded  dining-hall 
of  some  licentious  multi-millionaire.  They  got  up  on  the  in 
secure  thing  and  tried  to  dance ;  that  was  all  she  knew. 

During  the  entire  period,  and  for  that  matter,  right  up  to 
the  opening  night  she  never  saw  a  bar  of  music  except  what 
stood  on  the  piano  rack,  nor  a  written  word  of  the  lyrics  she 
was  supposed  to  sing.  Eose  couldn't  sing  very  much.  She  had 
a  rather  timorous,  throaty  little  contralto  that  contrasted 
oddly  with  the  fine  free  thrill  of  her  speaking  voice.  But  no 
body  had  asked  her  what  her  voice  was,  nor  indeed,  whether 
she  could  sing  at  all.  She  picked  up  the  tunes  quickly  enough, 
by  ear,  but  the  words  she  was  always  a  little  uncertain  about. 

It  all  seemed  too  utterly  haphazard  to  be  possible,  but  Eose 
decided  not  to  ask  any  of  the  authorities  about  this,  because, 
while  the  possibility  of  Grant's  return  dangled  over  her  head, 
she  didn't  want  to  remind  anybody  how  green  she  was.  But 
she  finally  questioned  one  of  her  colleagues  in  the  chorus 
about  it,  and  was  told  that  back  at  the  beginning  of  things, 
they  had  had  their  voices  tried  by  the  musical  director, 
who  had  conducted  three  or  four  music  rehearsals  before 

248 


EOSE    KEEPS    THE    PATH  249 

John  Galbraith  arrived.  They  had  never  had  any  music  to 
sing  from  but  there  had  been  half  a  dozen  mimeograph  copies 
of  the  words  to  the  songs,  which  the  girls  had  put  their  heads 
together  over  in  groups  of  three  or  four,  and  more  or  less 
learned.  What  had  become  of  this  dope,  and  whether  it  was 
still  available  for  Eose  in  case  she  were  animated  by  a  purely 
supererogatory  desire  to  study  it,  the  girl  didn't  know. 

She  was  a  pale-haired  girl,  whom  Eose  thought  she  had 
heard  addressed  as  Larson,  and  she  had  emerged  rather 
slowly  as  an  individual  personality,  out  of  the  ruck  of  the 
chorus;  a  fact  in  her  favor,  really,  because  the  girls  who  had 
first  driven  themselves  home  to  Eose  through  the  shell  of  her 
intense  preoccupation  with  doing  what  John  Galbraith 
wanted,  had  been  the  vividly  and  viciously  objectionable  ones. 
The  thing  that  had  prompted  her  to  sit  down  beside  Larson 
and,  with  this  question  about  how  one  learned  the  words  to 
the  songs,  take  her  first  real  step  toward  an  acquaintance, 
was  an  absence  of  any  strong  dislike,  rather  than  the  presence 
of  a  real  attraction. 

She  made  a  surprising  discovery  when  the  girl,  with  a 
friendly  pat  on  the  sofa  beside  her,  for  an  invitation  to  her 
to  sit  down,  began  answering  her  question.  She  was  a  real 
beauty.  Or,  more  accurately,  she  possessed  the  constituent 
qualities  of  beauty.  She  was  pure  English  eighteenth  century ; 
might  have  stepped  down  out  of  a  Gainsborough  portrait. 
Dressed  right,  and  made  up  a  little,  with  her  effects  legiti 
mately  heightened  (and  warned  not  to  speak),  she  could  have 
gone  to  the  Charity  Ball  as  the  Honorable  Mrs.  Graham,  and 
Bertie  Willis  would  have  gone  mad  about  her.  Only  you  had 
to  look  twice  at  her  to  perceive  that  this  was  so;  and  what 
she  lacked  was  just  the  unanalyzable  quality  that  makes  one 
look  twice. 

Her  speaking  voice  would  have  driven  Bertie  mad,  too — 
foaming,  biting  mad.  It  was  disconcertingly  loud,  in  the 
first  place,  and  it  came  out  upon  the  promontories  of  speech 
with  a  flat  whang  that  fairly  made  you  jump.  Its  undula 
tions  of  pitch  gave  you  something  the  same  sensation  as  rid 
ing  rapidly  over  a  worn-out  asphalt  pavement  in  a  five-hun- 


250  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

dred-dollar  automobile;  unforeseen  springs  into  the  air,  de 
scents  into  unexpected  pits.  Her  grammar  wasn't  flagrantly 
bad,  though  it  had,  rather  pitiabl}',  a  touch  of  the  genteel 
about  it.  But  now,  when  she  spoke  to  Eose,  and  with  the 
lassitude  of  fatigue  in  her  voice  besides,  Eose  heard  something 
friendly  about  it. 

"I  don't  know  what  you  should  worry  about  any  of  that 
stuff  for,"  she  said.  "How  you  sing  or  what  you  sing  don't 
make  much  difference." 

Eose  admitted  that  it  didn't  seem  to.  "But  you  see,"  she 
said  (she  hadn't  had  a  human  soul  to  talk  to  for  more  than 
a  week  and  she  had  to  make  a  friend  of  somebody),  "you  see, 
I've  just  got  to  keep  this  job.  And  if  every  little  helps,  as 
they  say,  perhaps  that  would." 

The  girl  looked  at  her  oddly,  almost  suspiciously,  as  if  for 
a  moment  she  had  doubted  whether  Eose  had  spoken  in  good 
faith.  "You've  got  as  good  a  chance  of  losing  your  job,"  she 
said,  "as  Galbraith  has  of  losing  his." 

"I  don't  worry  about  it,"  said  Eose,  "when  I'm  up  there 
on  the  stage  at  work.  It's  too  exciting.  And  then,  I  feel 
somehow  that  it's  going  all  right.  But  early  in  the  morning, 
I  get  to  imagining  all  sorts  of  things.  He's  so  terribly  sud 
den.  The  girl  whose  place  I  got, — she  hadn't  any  warning, 
you  know.  It  just  happened." 

The  Larson  girl  gave  a  decisive  little  nod.  Not  so  much,  it 
seemed,  in  assent  to  what  Eose  had  just  said,  but  as  if  some 
question  in  her  own  mind  had  been  answered. 

"You'll  get  used  to  that  feeling,"  she  said.  "You've  got 
to  take  a  chance  anyway,  so  why  worry?  "We  can  work  our 
heads  off,  but  if  the  piece  is  a  fliv  the  opening  night,  they'll 
tack  up  the  notice,  and  there  we'll  be  with  two  weeks'  pay 
for  eight  weeks'  work,  and  another  six  weeks'  work  for  noth 
ing  in  something  else  if  we're  lucky  enough  to  get  it." 

This  was  a  possibility  Eose  hadn't  thought  of.^-Bufc — that 
isn't  fair !"  she  said. 

The  other  girl  laughed  grimly.  "Fair !"  she  echoed.  "What 
they  want  to  print  that  word  in  the  dictionary  for,  I  don't 
see.  Because  what  it  means  don't  exist.  Not  where  I  live, 


ROSE    KEEPS    THE    PATH  251 

anyway.  But  what's  the  good  of  making  a  fuss  about  it? 
We've  got  to  take  our  chance  like  everybody  else." 

"I  don't  believe  this  piece  will  fail,  though,"  said  Rose. 
"I  don't  think  Mr.  Galbraith  would  let  it.  I  think  he's  a  per 
fect  wonder,  don't  you?" 

The  Larson  girl  looked  at  her  again.  "He's  supposed  to  be 
about  the  best  in  the  business,"  she  said,  "and  I  guess  he  is." 
She  added,  "Dave  tells  me  he's  going  to  put  you  with  us  in 
the  sextette." 

Dave  was  the  thick  pianist,  and  Rose  had  found  him  in  the 
highest  degree  obnoxious.  He  seemed  to  occupy  an  indeter 
minate  social  position  in  their  ship's  company,  between  the 
forecastle,  which  was  the  chorus,  and  the  quarter-deck,  which 
comprised  Galbraith  (you  might  call  him  the  pilot),  the  baby- 
faced  man  with  the  tortoise-shell  spectacles,  reputed  to  be 
the  author,  two  awesome  intermittent  gentlemen  identified  in 
the  dressing-room  as  the  owners  of  the  piece,  and  the  musical 
director,  together  with  one  or  two  more  as  yet  unclassified. 
The  principals,  when  they  should  appear,  would,  Rose  as 
sumed,  belong  on  the  quarter-deck  too.  The  social  gap  be 
tween  this  afterguard  and  Rose  and  her  colleagues  in  the 
chorus,  was  not  so  very  wide,  but  it  was  abysmally  deep. 
Nevertheless,  the  pianist,  buoyed  up  on  the  wings  of  a  bound 
less  effrontery,  seemed  to  manage  to  remain  unaware  of  it. 

He  had  started  rehearsals  with  this  piece,  it  appeared,  as 
a  chorus-man,  and  had  become  a  pianist,  thanks  to  the  inter 
position  of  Fate  (the  real  pianist  had  fallen  suddenly  and 
desperately  ill),  and  to  his  own  irresistible  assurance  that  he 
could  do  anything.  He  could  keep  time  and  he  hit  perhaps 
a  third  of  the  notes  right. 

The  chorus  liked  him.  The  girls  all  called  him  Dave, 
seemed  to  appreciate  his  notion  of  humor,  and  accepted  his 
hugs  and  pawings  as  a  matter  of  course.  But  he  took  his 
jokes,  his  familiarities,  and  his  apparently  impregnable  self- 
esteem,  upon  the  quarter-deck — slapped  the  author  on  the 
back  now  and  then,  and  had  even  been  known  to  address 
John  Galbraith  as  "Old  man."  Incidentally,  he  hung  about 
within  ear-shot  during  conferences  of  the  powers,  freely 


252  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

offered  his  advice,  and  brought  all  sorts  of  interesting  tid 
bits  of  gossip  and  prophecy  back  to  the  chorus. 

His  announcement  that  Eose  was  going  to  be  put  into  the 
sextette  was  entitled  to  consideration,  even  though  it  couldn't 
be  banked  on.  There  were  three  mediums  and  three  big 
girls  in  the  sextette.  (Olga  Larson  was  one  of  the  mediums 
and  so  needn't  fear  replacement  by  Eose,  who  was  a  big  girl.) 
Besides  appearing  in  two  numbers  as  a  background  to  one 
of  the  principals,  they  had  one  all  to  themselves,  a  fact  which 
constituted  them  a  sort  of  super-chorus.  Galbraith  used  to 
keep  them  for  endless  drills  after  the  general  rehearsal  was 
dismissed. 

But  the  intimation  that  Eose  was  to  be  promoted  to  this 
select  inner  circle,  didn't,  as  it  first  came  to  her,  give  her  any 
pleasure.  Somehow,  as  Larson  told  her  about  it,  she  could 
fairly  see  the  knowing  greasy  grin  that  would  have  been 
Dave's  comment  on  this  prophecy.  And  in  the  same  flash, 
she  interpreted  the  Larson  girl's  look,  half  incredulous,  half 
satirical,  and  her,  "You've  got  as  good  a  chance  of  losing  your 
job  as  Galbraith  has  of  losing  his." 

"I  haven't  heard  anything  about  being  put  in  the  sextette," 
she  said  quietly,  "and  I  don't  believe  I  will  be." 

"Well,  I  don't  know  why  not."  There  was  a  new  warmth 
in  the  medium's  voice.  Rose  had  won  a  victory  here,  and  she 
knew  it.  "You've  got  the  looks  and  the  shape,  and  you  can 
dance  better  than  any  of  the  big  girls,  or  us  mediums,  either. 
And  if  he  doesn't  put  that  big  Benedict  lemon  into  the  back 
line  where  she  belongs,  and  give  you  her  place  in  the  sex 
tette,  it  will  be  because  he's  afraid  of  her  drag." 

Eose  forbore  to  inquire  into  the  nature  of  the  Benedict 
girl's  drag.  Whatever  it  may  have  been,  John  Galbraith  was 
evidently  not  afraid  of  it,  because  as  he  dismissed  that  very 
rehearsal,  calling  the  rest  of  the  chorus  for  twelve  the  follow 
ing  morning,  and  the  sextette  for  eleven,  he  told  Eose  to  re 
port  at  the  earlier  hour.  And  a  moment  later,  she  heard  Dave 
say  to  the  big  show  girl  named  Vesta  Folsom  (some  one  with 
a  vein  of  playful  irony  must  have  been  responsible  for  this 
christening),  "Well,  maybe  I  didn't  call  that  turn." 


EOSE    KEEPS    THE    PATH  253 

'TTou're  the  original  wise  guy,  all  right/'  Vesta  admitted. 
"You're  Joseph  to  all  the  sure  things." 

Barring  Olga  Larson,  the  chorus  was  probably  unanimous, 
Rose  reflected,  in  looking  at  it  like  that.  They  accounted  for 
her  having  got  a  job  in  the  first  place  at  Grant's  expense, 
and  a  promotion  so  soon  thereafter  to  the  sextette,  by  assum 
ing  that  John  Galbraith  had  a  sentimental  interest  in  her. 
Whether  his  reward  had  been  collected  in  advance,  or  was 
still  unpaid,  was  an  interesting  theme  for  debate.  But  that, 
past  or  present,  the  reward  was  his  actuating  motive,  it 
wouldn't  occur  to  anybody  to  question. 

There  was  no  malice  in  this.  Rose  didn't  lose  caste  with 
any  of  them  on  account  of  it.  But  a  chprus-girl  is  the  most 
sentimental  person  in  the  world.  If  there's  anybody  who 
really  believes  that  love  makes  the  world  go  round,  she  is  that 
one.  It's  love  that  actuates  men  to  deeds  of  heroism  or  of 
crime ;  it's  love  that  makes  men  invest  good  money  in  musical 
comedies ;  love  that  makes  stars  out  of  her  undeserving  sisters 
in  the  chorus;  love  that  is  always  waiting  round  the  corner 
to  open  the  door  to  wealth  and  fame  for  her. 

So  when  Grant  came  back  and  ate  her  humble  pie  in  vain, 
and  later,  when  Benedict  was  relegated  to  a  place  in  the  back 
line,  the  natural  explanation  was  that  Galbraith  was  crazy 
about  the  new  girl. 

Of  course  it  set  Rose  all  ablaze  with  wrath  when  she  became 
aware  of  this.  It  was  precisely  because  she  had  rebelled 
against  the  theory  that  love  was  what  made  the  world  go 
round,  that  she  was  here  in  the  chorus.  Had  she  been  con 
tent  to  let  it  make  her  world  go  round,  she  never  would  have 
left  Rodney.  The  only  way  she  had  of  refuting  the  assump 
tion  in  this  case  would  be  by  making  good  so  demonstrably 
and  instantaneously,  that  they'd  be  compelled  to  see  that  her 
promotion  had  been  inevitable. 

It  was  in  this  spirit,  with  blazing  cheeks  and  eyes,  that 
she  attacked  the  next  morning's  rehearsal.  She  was  only 
dimly  aware  of  Benedict  out  in  the  hall  in  front,  viperishly 
waiting  for  the  arrival  of  one  of  the  owners  to  make  an  im 
passioned  plea  for  reinstatement.  Her  tears  or  her  tantrums 


S54  THE    SEAL   ADVEXTURE 

were  matters  of  supremely  little  importance.  But  that  John 
Galbraith  should  see  that  he  had  promoted  her  on  merit  and 
on  nothing  but  merit,  mattered  enormously. 

Lacking  the  clue,  he  watched  her  in  a  sort  of  amused  per 
plexity.  Her  way  of  snatching  his  instructions,  her  almost 
viciously  determined  manner  of  carrying  them  out,  would  have 
been  natural  had  she  been  working  under  the  spur  of  some 
stinging  rebuke,  instead  of  under  the  impetus  of  an  unexpected 
promotion. 

"Don't  make  such  hard  work  of  it,  Dane,"  he  caid  at  last. 
"You're  all  right,  but  have  a  little  fun  out  of  it.  There  are 
eight  hundred  people  out  there,"  he  waved  his  arm  out  to 
ward  the  empty  hall,  "who  have  paid  their  hard-earned 
money  to  feel  jolly  and  have  a  good  time.  If  you  go  on 
looking  like  that,  they'll  think  this  piece  was  produced  by 
Simon  Legree." 

There  came  the  same  gleaming  twinkle  in  his  eye  that  had 
disarmed  her  resentment  once  before,  and  as  before,  she  found 
herself  feeling  rather  absurd.  "What  mattered  the  microceph- 
alic  imaginings  of  greasy  Dave  and  his  friends  among  the 
chorus  ?  John  Galbraith  wasn't  the  sort  of  man  to  get  infatu 
ated  with  a  chorus-girl.  The  gleam  in  his  eye  was  enough,  all 
by  itself,  to  make  that  plain. 

So,  flushing  up  a  little,  she  grinned  back  at  him,  gave  him 
a  nod  of  acquiescence,  and  fell  back  to  her  place  for  the  be 
ginning  of  the  next  evolution. 

"If  she  smiles  like  that,"  thought  John  Galbraith,  "she'll 
break  up  the  show."  At  the  end  of  the  rehearsal,  he  said  to 
her,  "You're  doing  very  well  indeed,  Dane.  If  I  could  have 
caught  you  ten  years  ago,  I  could  have  made  a  dancer  out  of 
you." 

It  was  a  very  real,  unqualified  compliment,  and  as  such  Rose 
understood  it.  Because,  by  a  dancer,  he  meant  something 
very  different  from  a  prancing  chorus-girl.  The  others  gig 
gled  and  exchanged  glances  with  Dave  at  the  piano.  They 
didn't  understand.  To  them,  the  compliment  seemed  to  have 
been  delivered  with  the  left  hand.  And  somehow,  an  amused 
recognition  of  the  fact  that  they  didn't  understand,  as  well  as 


BOSE    KEEPS    THE    PATH  255 

of  the  fact  that  she  did,  flashed  across  from  John  Galbraith's 
eyes  to  hers. 

"Just  a  minute,"  he  said  as  they  all  started  to  leave  the 
stage,  and  they  came  back  and  gathered  in  a  half-circle  around 
him.  "We'll  rehearse  the  first  act  to-night  with  the  princi 
pals.  You  six  girls  are  supposed  to  be  young  millionairesses, 
very  up-to-date — bachelor-girl  type,  intimate  friends  of  the 
leading  lady,  who  is  a  multi-millionairess  that's  run  away 
from  home.  You've  all  got  a  few  lines  to  say.  Go  to  Mr.  Quan 
and  get  your  parts  and  have  them  up  by  to-night." 

At  half  past  four  that  afternoon,  when  the  regular  chorus 
rehearsal  was  over,  Eose  asked  John  Galbraith  if  she  might 
speak  to  him  for  a  minute.  He  had  one  foot  on  a  chair  and 
was. in  the  act  of  unlacing  his  dancing  shoes,  so  he  seemed  to 
be,  for  him,  comparatively  permanent.  He  had  a  disconcert 
ing  way,  she  had  noticed,  of  walking  away  on  some  business 
of  his  own  in  the  middle  of  other  people's  sentences,  intending 
to  come  back,  no  doubt,  in  time  to  hear  the  end  of  them,  but 
forgetting  to. 

''Fire  away,"  he  said,  looking  around  at  her  over  his  shoul 
der.  Then,  with  reference  to  the  blue-bound  pair  of  sides  she 
held  in  her  hand,  "What's  the  matter?  Isn't  the  part  fat 
enough  for  you?" 

"Tat  enough?"  Eose  echoed  inquiringly.  "Oh,  you  mean 
long  enough."  She  smiled  in  good-humored  acknowledgment 
of  his  joke,  and  let  that  do  for  an  answer. 

John  Galbraith  hadn't  been  sure  that  it  would  be  a  joke  to 
Eose.  He'd  been  a  musical-comedy  producer  so  long  that 
no  megalomaniacal  absurdity  could  take  him  by  surprise. 
There  were  chorus-girls  no  doubt  in  this  very  company,  who, 
on  being  promoted  to  microscopic  parts,  would  be  capable  of 
complaining  because  they  weren't  bigger. 

"All  the  same,"  said  Eose,  "'I'm  afraid  I've  got  to  tell  you 
that  I  can't  take  this,  and  to  ask  you  to  put  me  back  into  the 
regular  chorus." 

He  wasn't  immune  to  surprise  after  all,  it  seemed.  He 
straightened  up  in  a  flash  and  stared  at  her.  "What  on  earth 
are  you  talking  about  ?"  he  asked. 


256  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"If  I  have  words  to  say,  even  only  a  few,  wouldn't  anybody 
who  happened  to  be  in  the  audience,  know  who  I  was? — I 
mean  if  they  knew  me  already." 

"Of  course  they  would.    What  of  it?" 

"I  told  you,"  said  Rose,  "the  day  you  gave  me  a  job,  that  it 
wasn't  a  lark.  I  had  to  begin  earning  my  own  living  sud 
denly,  and  without  any  training  for  it  at  all,  and  this  seemed 
to  be  the  best  way.  That's — all  true,  and  it's  true  that  no 
one  could  come  and,  as  you  say,  lead  me  away  by  the  ear.  No 
body's  responsible  for  me  but  myself.  But  there  are  people 
who'd  be  terribly  shocked  and  hurt  if  they  found  out  I'd  gone 
on  the  stage.  They  know  I'm  earning  my  own  living,  but 
they  don't  know  how  I'm  doing  it.  I  thought  that  as  just  one 
of  the  chorus,  made  up  and  all,  I'd  be  safe.  But  with  these 
lines  to  say  .  .  ." 

"Now  listen  to  me,"  said  John  Galbraith;  "listen  as  hard 
as  you  can.  Because  when  I've  done  talking,  you  will  have  to 
make  up  your  mind.  In  the  first  place  you  wouldn't  be  'safe/ 
as  you  said,  even  in  the  chorus.  A  make-up  isn't  a  disguise. 
You  will  be  rouged  and  powdered,  your  eyelashes  blackened, 
your  lips  reddened  and  so  on,  not  to  make  you  look  different, 
but  to  keep  you  looking  the  same  under  the  strong  lights. 
You're  not  the  sort  of  person  to  escape  notice.  That's  the 
reason  I  made  up  my  mind  to  hire  you  before  I  knew  you 
could  dance.  I  saw  you  standing  back  there  in  the  doorway. 
You've  got  the  quality  about  you  that  makes  people  see  you. 
That's  one  of  your  assets. 

"So,  if  you're  ashamed  of  being  recognized  in  this  business, 
you'd  better  get  out  of  it  altogether.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
seems  to  me  that  if  you've  got  to  earn  your  living,  it's  nobody's 
business  but  your  own  how  you  do  it.  You're  the  one  who'll 
go  hungry  if  you  don't  earn  it,  not  these  friends  of  yours.  So, 
if  it  seems  a  legitimate  way  of  earning  a  living  to  you,  if  you 
don't  feel  disgraced  or  degraded  by  being  in  it,  you'd  better 
forget  your  friends  and  go  ahead.  You've  made  an  excellent 
start;  you've  earned  a  legitimate  promotion.  It  will  mean 
that  instead  of  getting  twenty  dollars  a  week  when  the  show 
opens,  you  will  get  twenty-five.  It's  a  long  time  since  I've 


EOSE   KEEPS    THE    PATH  257 

given  a  person  without  experience  a  chance  like  that.  I  gave 
it  to  you  because  you  seemed  ambitious  and  intelligent — the 
sort  who'd  see  me  through.  But  if  you  aren't  ambitious,  if 
the  game  doesn't  look  worth  playing  to  you,  and  you  aren't 
willing  to  play  it  for  all  it's  worth — why,  good  as  you  are,  I 
don't  want  you  at  all.  So  that's  your  choice  1" 

His  manner  wasn't  quite  so  harsh  as  his  words,  but  it  con 
vinced  her  that  he  meant  every  one  of  them  right  to  the  foot 
of  the  letter. 

She  couldn't  answer  for  a  moment.  She  hadn't  guessed  that 
the  choice  he  was  going  to  offer  her  would  be  between  taking 
the  little  part  he  had  given  her  and  playing  it  for  all  it  was 
worth,  defiant  of  Rodney's  feelings  and  of  the  scandal  of  the 
Lake  Shore  Drive — and  going  back  to  her  three-dollar  room 
this  afternoon,  out  of  a  job  and  without  even  a  glimmering 
chance  of  finding  another. 

"Take  your  time,"  he  said.  "I  don't  want  to  be  a  brute 
about  it,  but  look  here !  Try  to  see  it  my  way  for  a  minute. 
Here  are  my  employers,  the  owners  of  this  piece.  They're  put 
ting  thousands  of  dollars  into  the  production  of  it.  They've 
hired  me  to  make  that  production  a  success.  Well,  I  don't 
know  about  other  games,  but  this  game's  a  battle.  If  we  win, 
it  will  be  because  we  put  every  bit  of  steam  and  every  bit  of 
confidence  we've  got  into  it  and  make  it  win.  That  goes  for 
me,  and  for  the  principals,  and  right  down  through  to  the  last 
girl  in  the  chorus.  Every  night  there'll  be  a  new  audience 
out  there  that  you  will  have  to  fight — shake  up  out  of  the 
grouch  they  get  when  they  pay  for  their  tickets;  persuade  to 
laugh  and  loosen  up  and  come  and  play  with  you. 

"Will  you  be  able  to  do  your  share,  do  you  suppose,  if  you're 
slinking  around,  afraid  of  being  recognized?  We  don't  care 
whether  your  pussy-cat  friends  get  their  fur  rubbed  the  wrong 
way  or  not.  The  only  thing  we  care  about  is  putting  this  show 
across.  Well,  if  you  feel  the  way  we  do  about  it,  if  you  can 
make  it  the  one  thing  you  do  care  about,  too — why,  come 
along.  Let  the  pussy-cats  go  .  .  ."  He  finished  with  a 
snap  of  his  fingers. 

"The  only  one  that  really  matters  isn't  a  pussy-cat,"  said 


258  THE   BEAU   ADVENTURE 

Rose,  with  a  reluctant  wide  smile,  "and — he'd  agree  with  you 
altogether,  if  he  didn't  know  you  were  talking  to  me.  And 
Fin  really  very  much  obliged  to  you." 

"You  will  come  along  then  ?" 

"Yes,"  said  Rose,  "I'll  come." 

"No  flutters?"  questioned  Galbraith.  "No  eleventh-hour  re 
pentance  ?" 

"No,"  said  Rose,  "I'll  see  it  through." 

John  Galbraith  went  away  satisfied.  Rose  had  the  same 
power  that  he  had,  of  making  a  simple  unemphatic  statement 
irresistibly  convincing.  When  she  said  that  she  would  go 
through,  he  knew  that  unless  struck  by  lightning,  she  would. 
But  there  had  been  something  at  once  ironic  and  tender  about 
the  girl's  smile,  when  she  had  spoken  of  the  only  one  who 
really  mattered,  that  he  couldn't  account  for.  Who  was  the 
only  one  that  really  mattered,  anyway?  Her  husband?  He 
didn't  think  it  likely.  Young  women  who  quarreled  with  their 
husbands  and  ran  away  from  them  to  go  on  the  stage,  wouldn't, 
as  far  as  his  experience  went,  be  likely  to  smile  over  them 
like  that.  More  probably  a  brother — a  younger  brother,  per 
haps,  fiercely  proud  as  such  a  boy  would  be  of  such  a  sister. 

She  certainly  had  sand,  that  girl.  He  was  mighty  glad  his 
bluff  that  he  would  put  her  out  of  the  chorus  altogether,  un 
less  she  took  the  little  part  in  the  sextette,  had  worked.  He'd 
have  felt  rather  a  fool  if  she  had  called  it. 

Of  course  the  thing  that  had  got  Rose  was  the  echo,  through 
everything  John  Galbraith  had  said,  of  Rodney's  own  phi 
losophy  ;  his  dear,  big,  lusty,  rather  remorseless  way.  And  now 
again,  as  before  when  she  had  left  him,  it  was  his  view  of  life 
that  was  recoiling  upon  his  own  head. 

She  was  really  grateful  to  Galbraith.  What  had  she  left 
Rodney  for,  except  to  build  a  self  for  herself;  to  acquire, 
through  whatever  pains  might  be  the  price  of  it,  a  life  that 
didn't  derive  from  him ;  that  was,  at  the  core  of  it,  her  own  ? 
Yet  here,  right  at  the  beginning  of  her  pilgrimage,  she'd  have 
turned  down  the  by-path  of  self-sacrifice ;  have  begun  ordering 
her  life  with  reference  to  Rodney,  rather  than  herself,  if  John 
Galbraith  hadn't  headed  her  back. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  GIRL  WITH  THE  BAD  VOICE 

THE  GIRL  UP-STAIRS  had  quite  a  miscellaneous  lot  of  plot ; 
indeed  a  plot  fancier  might  have  detected  nearly  all  the  fa 
mous  strains  in  its  lineage.  Its  foci  were  Sylvia  Huntington, 
the  beautiful  multi-millionairess,  and  Richard  Benham, 
nephew  of  Minim,  the  Cosmetic  King  and  head  of  the  Talcum 
Trust.  Sylvia,  tired  of  being  sought  for  her  wealth,  and 
yearning  to  be  loved  for  herself  alone,  has  run  away  to  Bo 
hemia  and  installed  herself  in  an  attic  over  a  studio  occupied 
by  two  penniless  artists,  one  a  poet,  the  other  a  musician.  Only 
they  aren't  penniless  any  more,  having  leaped  to  wealth  and 
fame  with  an  immensely  successful  musical  comedy  they  have 
just  written.  And,  like  Nanki  Poo,  the  musician  isn't  really 
a  musician,  but  is  the  talented,  rebellious  nephew  of  the  Cos 
metic  King,  none  other  than  Dick  Benham  himself,  a  truant 
from  his  tyrannical  uncle's  determination  to  make  him  into  a 
rouge  and  talcum  salesman.  He  falls  in  love  with  Sylvia,  not 
knowing  her  as  Sylvia,  of  course,  but  only  as  the  girl  up-stairs, 
a  poor  little  wretch  to  whom  in  the  goodness  of  his  heart,  he 
is  giving  singing  lessons.  And  she  falls  in  love  with  him, 
knowing  him  neither  as  Dick  Benham,  nor  as  the  successful 
composer  (because  his  authorship  of  the  musical  comedy  has 
been  kept  a  secret  from  her),  but  only  as  a  poor  struggling 
musician.  Poor  Dick's  affections  are  temporarily  led  astray 
by  the  mercenary  seductions  of  the  leading  lady  in  his  opera, 
who  has  learned  the  secret  of  his  true  identity  and  vast  wealth, 
and  means  to  marry  him  under  the  cloak  of  disinterested  af 
fection.  He  gets  bad  advice  from  his  poet  friend,  too,  who 
has  dishonorable  designs  on  the  girl  up-stairs  and  so  warns 
Dick  against  throwing  himself  away  on  a  nobody,  of,  possibly, 
doubtful  virtue.  It  is,  of  course,  essential  to  Sylvia  that  Dick 
should  aek  her  to  marry  him  before  he  learns  who  she  really 

259 


260  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

is,  in  order  that  she  may  be  sure  it  isn't  for  her  wealth  that 
he  is  seeking  her. 

This  was  the  general  lie  of  the  land,  though  the  thing  was 
complicated,  of  course,  by  minor  intrigues,  as  for  instance  in 
the  first  act,  when  Minim,  the  uncle,  came  to  inquire  of  the 
successful  composer  what  his  terms  would  be  for  introducing 
a  song  into  his  opera,  extolling  the  merits  of  Minim's  newest 
brand  of  liquid  face-powder.  Then  there  was  the  comic  de 
tective,  whom  Sylvia's  frantic  father  had  given  the  job  of  find 
ing  her,  and  who,  considering  that  he  was  the  typical  idiot 
detective  of  musical  comedy,  came  unaccountably  close  to  do 
ing  it. 

Then  in  the  second  act,  there  was  the  confusion  produced 
by  the  fact  that  Dick  and  his  poet  friend  gave  a  midnight 
party  on  the  roof,  unaware  of  the  fact  that  Sylvia  made  it  a 
practise,  during  these  hot  nights,  to  crawl  out  from  her  attic, 
on  to  this  same  roof  and  sleep  there.  And  on  this  particular 
night,  she  had  invited  her  six  bachelor-girl  friends,  who  were 
in  her  confidence,  to  come  and  share  its  hospitalities  with  her. 
The  mutual  misunderstandings,  by  this  time  piled  mountain 
high,  were  projected  into  the  third  act  by  the  not  entirely  un 
precedented  device  of  a  mask  ball  in  the  palatial  Fifth  Avenue 
mansion  of  Sylvia's  father,  in  celebration  of  her  return  home 
— a  ball  whose  invitation  list  was  precisely  coincident,  even 
down  to  the  detective,  with  the  persons  who  had  appeared  in 
the  first  two  acts.  One  minute  before  the  last  curtain,  Dick 
and  Sylvia  manage  to  thread  their  way  out  of  the  tangle  of 
scandal  and  misconception,  and  satisfy  each  other  as  to  the 
disinterested  quality  of  their  mutual  adoration,  falling  into 
each  other's  arms  just  as  the  curtain  starts  down. 

It  was  not,  of  course,  until  after  a  good  many  rehearsals 
that  Rose  could  have  given  a  connected  account  of  it  like  that. 
They  worked  for  three  hours  on  this  first  occasion,  merely  get 
ting  through  the  first  act — a  miserable  three  hours,  too,  for 
Rose,  owing  to  a  little  misfortune  that  befell  her  right  at  the 
beginning. 

The  glow  of  determination  Galbraith  had  inspired  her  with, 
to  put  her  own  shoulder  to  the  wheel  and  do  her  very  topmost 


THE    GIEL    WITH    THE    BAD    VOICE        261 

best,  for  the  one  great  desideratum,  the  success  of  the  show, 
had  kept  her  studying  her  little  handful  of  lines  long  after 
she  supposed  she  knew  them  perfectly.  They  weren't  very  sat 
isfactory  lines  to  stud}* — just  the  smallest  of  conversational 
small  change,  little  ejaculations  of  delight  or  dismay,  ac 
quiescence  or  dissent.  But  the  trouble  with  them  was,  they 
were,  for  the  most  part,  exactly  the  last  expressions  that  a 
smart  young  woman  of  the  type  she  was  supposed  to  represent 
would  use. 

So,  remembering  what  Galbraith  had  said  about  everybody 
down  to  the  last  chorus-man  doing  the  best  he  knew  for  the 
success  of  the  show,  Eose  sought  him  out,  for  a  minute,  just 
before  the  rehearsal  began,  and  asked  if  she  might  change  two 
of  her  lines  a  little. 

Galbraith  grinned  at  her,  turned  and  beckoned  to  the  baby- 
faced  man  in  spectacles  who  stood  a  dozen  paces  away.  "Oh, 
Mr.  Mills !"  he  called.  "Can  you  come  over  here  a  minute  ?" 

"He's  the  author,"  Galbraith  then  explained  to  Kose,  "and 
we  can't  change  this  book  of  his  without  his  permission." 

Then,  "This  is  Miss  Dane  of  the  sextette/'  he  said  to  Mills, 
"and  she  tells  me  she'd  like  to  make  one  or  two  changes  in  her 
lines." 

It  didn't  need  a  sensitive  ear  to  detect  a  note  of  mockery  in 
this  speech,  though  Galbraith's  face  was  perfectly  solemn.  But 
the  face  of  the  author  went  a  delicate  pink  all  over,  and  his 
round  eyes  stared.  "My  God !"  he  said. 

The  exclamation  was  explosive  enough  to  catch  the  ear  of 
an  extremely  pretty  young  woman  who  stood  near  by  with  her 
hands  in  her  pockets.  She  wore  a  Burberry  raglan  and  an 
entirely  untrimmed  soft  felt  hat,  and  she  came  over  uncere 
moniously  and  joined  the  group. 

"Miss  Devereux,"  said  the  author,  with  hard-fetched  irony, 
"here's  a  chorus-girl  in  perfect  agreement  with  you.  She's  got 
about  six  lines  to  say,  and  she  wants  to  change  two  of  them." 

"What  are  your  changes,  Dane  ?"  Galbraith  asked. 

Queerly  enough,  the  curt  seriousness  of  his  speech  was  im 
mensely  grateful  to  her — suggested  that  she  perhaps  hadn't 
been,  wholly  anyhow,  the  object  of  his  derision  before. 


262  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEB 

"I  only  thought,"  said  Rose,  "that  if  instead  of  saying,  'My 
gracious,  Sylvia!'  I  said,  'Sylvia,  dear!'  or  something  like  that, 
it  would  sound  a  little  more  natural.  And  if  I  said,  'I  do 
wish,  Sylvia'  instead  of,  'I  wish  to  goodness,  Sylvia  .  .  ."; 

She  had  said  it  all  straight  to  the  author. 

"I  suppose,"  he  said,  sneering  very  hard,  "that  your  own 
personal  knowledge  of  the  way  society  women  talk  is  what 
leads  you  to  believe  that  your  phrases  are  better  than  mine  ?" 

"Yes,"  said  Eose,  serenely  matter-of-fact,  "it  is." 

Sarcasm  is  an  uncertain  sort  of  pop-gun.  You  never  can 
tell  from  which  end  it's  going  to  go  off. 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Miss  Devereux,  turning  now  a  deadly 
smile  on  him,  "whether  Miss — what's-her-name — agrees  with 
me  or  not.  But,  do  you  know,  I  agree  with  her." 

"Oh,  I  don't  care  a  damn!"  said  Mr.  Harold  Mills.  "Go  as 
far  as  you  like.  I  don't  recognize  the  piece  now.  What  it'll  be 
when  you — butchers  get  through  with  it  ... !"  He  flung 
out  his  hands  and  stalked  away. 

"Go  find  Mr.  Quan,"  said  Ga]braith  to  Eose,  "and  tell  him 
to  mark  those  changes  of  yours  in  the  book.  Tell  him  I 
said  so." 

It  was,  though,  a  pretty  unsatisfactory  victory.  Everybody 
was  grinning;  for  the  tale  spread  fast,  and  while  Eose  knew 
it  wasn't  primarily  at  her,  her  sensations  were  those  of  a  per 
fectly  serious,  well-meaning  child,  in  adult  company,  who,  in 
all  innocence  has  just  made  a  remark  which,  for  some  reason 
incomprehensible  to  him,  has  convulsed  one  member  of  it  with 
fury,  and  the  others  with  laughter.  More  or  less  she  could 
imagine  where  the  joke  lay.  Harold  had  evidently  been  quarrel 
ing  with  pretty  much  all  of  the  principals,  over  more  or  less 
necessary  changes  in  his  precious  text,  until  everybody  was 
rather  on  edge  about  it,  loaded  and  primed  for  all  sorts  of  ex 
plosions  ;  when,  cheerfully  along  came  Eose,  a  perfectly  green 
young  chorus-girl,  unsuspectingly  carrying  the  match  for  the 
mine,  or  the  straw  for  the  camel,  whichever  way  you  wanted 
to  put  it. 

She  wouldn't  have  minded  the  way  she  had  blundered  into 
the  focus  of  public  attention,  if,  in  other  particulars,  the  re- 


THE    GIRL    WITH    THE    BAD    VOICE        263 

hearsal  had  been  going  well  with  her.  Unluckily,  though,  she 
started  of!  wrong  foot  foremost  in  the  very  first  of  their  num 
bers,  with  a  mistake  that  snarled  up  everything  and  brought 
down  an  explosion  of  wrath  from  Galbraith.  Even  if  she'd 
been  trying,  he  groaned,  to  make  mistakes,  he  didn't  see  how 
she'd  managed  that  one.  But  the  real  nightmare  didn't  begin 
till  the  first  of  her  scenes  with  Sylvia,  where  she  had  to  talk. 

She'd  said  her  lines  over  about  a  thousand  times  apiece,  and 
practised  their  inflection  and  phrasing  in  as  many  ways  as 
she  could  think  of,  but  she  had  neglected  to  memorize  her  cues. 
Not  altogether,  of  course;  she  thought  she'd  learned  them,  but 
they  were  terribly  scanty  little  cues  anyway,  just  a  single  word, 
usually,  and  never  more  than  two,  and  nothing  short  of  abso 
lutely  automatic  memorization  was  any  good.  So  she  sat  se 
rene  through  a  five-second  stage  wait  while  Quan  frantically 
spun  the  pages  of  his  book  to  find  the  place — he  ought  to  have 
been  following  of  course,  but  he'd  yielded  to  the  temptation 
of  trying  to  do  something  else  at  the  same  time  and  had  got 
lost — and  then  dry-throated,  incapable  of  a  sound  for  a  couple 
of  seconds  more — hours  they  seemed — after  she  had  been 
identified  as  the  culprit  who  had  failed  to  come  in  on  a  cue. 

The  sight  of  the  author  out  in  the  hall  invoking  his  gods 
to  witness  that  this  girl  who  had  presumed  to  change  his  lines, 
was  an  idiot  incapable  of  articulate  speech,  brought  her  out 
of  her  daze.  But  even  then  she  couldn't  get  anything  quite 
right.  There  seemed  to  be  no  golden  mean  between  the  bellow 
of  a  fireman  and  a  tone  which  Galbraith  assured  her  wouldn't 
be  audible  three  rows  back.  And  when  they  came  to  one  of 
the  lines  she'd  been  allowed  to  change,  in  her  panic  over  the 
thing,  she  mixed  the  two  versions  impartially  together  into  a 
sputter  of  words  that  meant  nothing  at  all,  whereupon  the  au 
thor,  out  at  the  back  of  the  hall,  laughed  maniacally. 

She  would  have  gone  on  stuttering  at  it  until  she  got  it 
straight,  if  Galbraith  hadn't  put  her  out  of  her  misery  by  strid 
ing  over,  snatching  the  book  from  Quan,  and  reading  the  line 
himself.  She  hadn't  anything  more  to  say  in  the  first  act,  and 
she  managed  to  get  through  the  rest  of  the  song  numbers  with 
out  disaster,  if  equally  without  confidence  or  dash.  She  felt 


264  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

as  limp  as  if  she  had  been  boiled  and  put  through  the  clothes- 
wringer.  And  when,  as  he  dismissed  the  rehearsal  Galbraith 
told  her  to  wait  a  minute,  she  expected  nothing  less  than  ig 
nominious  reduction  to  the  ranks. 

"That  matter  of  putting  your  voice  over,  Dane,"  he  said,  to 
her  amazement  quite  casually,  "is  just  a  question  of  thinking 
where  you  want  it  to  go.  If  you'll  imagine  a  target  against 
the  back  wall  over  there,  and  will  your  voice  to  hit  it,  what 
ever  direction  you're  speaking  in,  and  however  softly  you 
speak,  you  will  be  heard.  If  you  forget  the  target  and  think 
you're  talking  to  the  person  on  the  stage  you're  supposed  to  be 
talking  to,  you  won't  be  heard.  Say  your  lines  over  to  me 
now,  without  raising  your  voice  or  looking  out  there.  But 
keep  the  target  in  mind." 

Rose  said  all  the  lines  she  had  in  the  whole  three  acts.  It 
didn't  take  a  minute.  He  nodded  curtly.  "You've  got  the 
idea."  He  added,  just  as  she  turned  away,  "You  were  quite 
right  to  suggest  those  changes.  They're  an  improvement." 

That  rehearsal  marked  the  nadir  of  Rose's  career  at  the 
Globe.  From  then  on,  she  was  steadily  in  the  ascendent,  not 
only  in  John  Galbraith's  good  graces,  which  was  all  of  course 
that  mattered.  She  won,  it  appeared,  a  sort  of  tolerant  esteem 
from  some  of  the  principals,  and  even  the  owners  themselves 
spoke  to  her  pleasantly. 

They  entertained  her  vastly,  now  that  a  confidence  in  her 
ability  to  do  her  own  part  left  her  leisure  to  look  around  a 
bit.  The  contrast  between  the  two  leading  women,  Patricia 
Devereux,  who  pla}red  the  title  part,  and  little  Anabel  Astor, 
who  played  the  mercenary  seductress,  was  a  piquant  source  of 
speculation.  As  far  as  speech  and  manners  went,  Miss  Deve 
reux  might  have  been  a  born  citizen  of  the  world  Rose  had 
been  naturalized  into  by  her  marriage  with  Rodney;  in  fact, 
she  reminded  her  rather  strikingly  of  Harriet.  She  was  cool, 
brusk,  hard  finished,  and,  as  was  evident  from  Galbraith's 
manifest  satisfaction  with  her,  thoroughly  workmanly  and 
competent.  Yet  she  never  seemed  really  to  work  in  rehearsal. 
She  gave  no  more  than  a  bare  outline  of  what  she  was  going 
to  do.  But  the  outline,  in  all  its  salient  angles,  was  perfectly 


THE    GIRL   WITH   THE   BAD   VOICE        265 

indicated.  She  rehearsed  in  her  ordinary  street  clothes,  with 
her  hat  on,  and  as  often  as  not,  with  a  wrist-bag  in  one  hand. 
She  neither  danced,  sang,  nor  acted.  But  she  had  her  part 
letter  perfect  before  any  of  the  other  principals.  She  never 
missed  a  cue,  and  though  she  sang  off  the  top  of  her  voice,  and 
let  the  confines  of  a  very  scant  little  tailor  skirt  mark  the  lim 
its  of  her  dancing,  she  sang  her  songs  in  perfect  tempo  and 
always  made  it  completely  clear  to  Galbraith  and  the  musical 
director,  just  how  much  of  the  stage  in  every  direction,  her 
dances  were  going  to  occupy  and  precisely  the  tempi  at  which 
they  were  to  be  executed.  In  a  word,  if  her  work  had  no  more 
emotional  value  than  a  mechanical  drawing,  it  did  have  the 
precision  of  one. 

Eose  mightn't  have  appreciated  this,  had  she  not  seen  and 
admired  Miss  Devereux  from  the  front  in  a  production  she 
and  Rodney  had  been  two  or  three  times  to  see  the  season  be 
fore. 

Little  Anabel  Astor  presented  as  striking  a  contrast  to  all 
this  as  it  would  be  possible  to  imagine.  She,  too,  had  attained 
a  good  deal  of  celebrity  in  the  musical-comedy  world — was  to 
be  one  of  the  features  of  the  cast.  She'd  come  up  from  the 
ranks  of  the  chorus.  She'd  been  one  of  the  ponies,  years  ago, 
in  some  of  George  M.  Cohan's  productions,  and  she  was  still 
just  a  chorus-girl.  But  a  chorus-girl  raised  to  the  third,  or 
fourth,  or,  if  you  like,  the  nth  power.  She  had  an  electric  grin, 
and  a  perfectly  boundless  vitality,  which  she  spent  as  freely 
on  rehearsals  as  on  performances.  She  always  dressed  for  re 
hearsals  just  as  the  chorus  did,  in  a  middy-blouse  and  bloom 
ers,  and  she  worked  as  hard  as  they  did,  and  even  more  un 
grudgingly. 

She  was  a  pretty  little  thing,  with  nothing  very  feminine 
about  her — even  her  voice  had  a  harsh  boyish  quality — and 
she  never  looked  prettier  to  Rose  than  when,  her  face  flushed 
with  an  hour's  honest  toil,  she  would  wipe  the  copious  sweat 
of  it  off  with  her  sleeve,  and  panting,  look  up  with  a  smile  at 
John  Galbraith  and  an  expectant  expression,  waiting  for  his 
next  command,  which  reminded  Rose  of  the  look  of  a  terrier 
alert  for  the  stick  his  master  means  to  throw  for  him.  Her 


2G6  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

speech  was  unaffectedly  that  of  a  Milwaukee  Avenue  gamin, 
and  it  served  adequately  and  admirably  as  a  vehicle  for  the 
expression  of  her  emotions  and  ideas. 

She  formed  her  likes  and  dislikes  with  a  complete  disregard 
of  the  social  or  professional  importance  of  the  objects  of  them. 
She  took  an  immediate  liking  to  Rose ;  gave  her  some  valuable 
hints  on  dancing,  took  to  calling  her  "dearie"  before  the  end 
of  the  second  rehearsal  and,  with  her  arm  around  her,  con 
fided  to  her  in  terms  of  blood-curdling  profanity,  her  opinion 
of  Stewart  Lester,  the  tenor,  who  played  the  part  of  Dick  Ben- 
ham  in  the  piece. 

The  queer  thing  was  that  she  and  Patricia  were  on  the 
best  of  terms.  They  didn't  compete,  that  was  it,  Rose  sup 
posed,  and  they  were  both  good  enough  cosmopolites  to  bridge 
across  the  antipodal  distances  between  their  respective  tra 
ditions  and  environments.  Patricia  hated  the  tenor  as  bitterly 
as  Anabel.  And,  in  her  own  way,  she  was  as  pleasantly 
friendly  to  Rose.  There  were  no  endearments  or  caresses,  nat 
urally,  but  her  brusk  nods  of  greeting  and  farewell  seemed  to 
have  real  good  feeling  behind  them. 

The  men  principals — this  was  rather  a  surprise  to  Rose — 
weren't  nearly  so  pleasant  nor  so  friendly.  Most  of  them  pro 
fessed  to  be  totally  unaware  of  her  existence  and  the  one  or 
two  who  showed  an  awareness — Freddy  France,  who  played 
the  comic  detective,  was  chief  of  these  offenders — did  it  in  a 
way  that  brought  the  fighting  blood  into  her  cheeks. 

My  astronomical  figure  for  the  expression  of  Rose's  rise  in 
her  profession  is,  in  one  important  particular,  misleading. 
There  was  nothing  precalculable  about  it,  as  there  is  about 
the  solemn  swing  of  the  stars.  The  impetus  and  direction  of 
Rose's  career  derived  from  two  incidents  that  might  just  as 
well  not  have  happened — two  of  the  flukiest  of  small  chances. 

The  first  of  these  chances  concerned  itself  with  Olga  Larson 
and  her  bad  voice.  Olga,  as  I  think  I  have  told  you,  was  one 
of  the  sextette.  And,  oddly  enough,  she  owed  her  membership 
in  this  little  group  of  quasi  principals,  to  her  voice  and  noth 
ing  else.  Because  it  was  a  bad  voice  only  when  she  talked. 
When  she  sang,  it  had  a  gorgeous  thrilling  ring  to  it  that  made 


THE    GIRL    WITH    THE    BAD    VOICE        267 

Patricia  Devereux,  when  she  heard  it,  clench  her  hands  and 
narrow  her  eyes.  She'd  never  been  taught  what  to  do  with  it, 
but  then,  for  what  Galbraith  wanted  of  her  she  needed  no 
teaching.  Her  ear  was  infallible ;  let  her  hear  a  tune  once  and 
she  could  reproduce  it  accurately,  squarely  up  to  time, 
squarely,  always,  in  the  middle  of  the  pitch.  When  she  opened 
her  rather  dainty-looking  mouth  and  sang,  she  could  give  you 
across  the  footlights  the  impression  that  at  least  four  first- 
class  sopranos  were  going  uncommon  strong.  She  hadn't  a 
salient  or  commonplace  enough  sort  of  beauty  to  have  singled 
her  out  from  the  chorus  and  she  was  no  better  a  dancer  than 
passable.  But  none  of  the  girls  who  would  be  picked  out  by  a 
committee  of  automobile  salesmen  as  the  prettiest  and  the 
best  dancers  in  the  chorus  could  sing  a  note,  and  the  sextette 
would  have  been  dumb  without  her  voice. 

It  was  natural  enough  that  Patricia  didn't  like  it.  She  owed 
her  own  position  as  a  leading  light-opera  soprano  to  the  culti 
vation  to  its  highest  possible  perfection  of  a  distinctly  second- 
rate  voice,  to  a  precise  knowledge  of  its  limitations  and  to  a 
most  scrupulous  economy  in  its  effects.  Inevitably,  then,  the 
raw  splendors  that  Olga  Larson  dispensed  so  prodigally  gave 
Patricia  the  creeps. 

Inevitably,  too,  without  any  conscious  malice  about  it,  she 
made  up  her  clear,  hard  little  mind  the  moment  she  heard 
Olga  talk,  that  she  was  utterly  impossible  for  the  sextette. 

"Really,  my  dear  man,"  she  told  Galbraith  after  the  first 
rehearsal,  "you'll  have  to  find  some  one  else.  American  audi 
ences  will  stand  a  good  deal,  I  know,  in  the  way  of  atrocious 
speech,  but  positively  she'll  be  hooted.  They'll  all  sound  fright 
ful  enough,  especially  because  that  Dane  girl,  if  that's  her 
name,  talks  like  a  lady,  but  this  one  .  .  . !"  She  gave  a 
cruelly  adequate  little  imitation  of  Olga's  delivery  of  one  of 
her  lines.  "Like  some  one  who  doesn't  know  how,  trying  to 
play  the  slide  trombone,"  she  commented. 

Galbraith  couldn't  pretend  that  she  exaggerated  the  hor 
rors  of  it,  but  explained  why  the  girl  was  indispensable.  The 
explanation  didn't  please  Patricia  any  too  well,  either. 

"Sing!"  she  cried  hotly.   "But  she  sings  detestably!" 


268  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"Xo  doubt,"  Galbraith  admitted,  "but  she  makes  a  great  big 
noise  always  on  the  right  note,  and  that's  what  that  bunch  of 
penny  whistlers  can't  do  without.  Give  her  a  little  time,"  he 
concluded  diplomatically,  "and  I'll  try  to  teach  her." 

"It  can't  be  taught,"  said  Patricia.  "That's  too  much  even 
for  you." 

So  it  happened  that  when  Rose  came  out  of  her  own  night 
mare,  got  her  breath  and  found  leisure  to  look  around,  she 
found  some  one  else  whose  troubles  weren't  so  transitory.  The 
little  scene  in  the  first  act,  between  Sylvia  and  the  sextette, 
was  held  up  again  and  again,  endlessly,  it  seemed  to  Rose, — 
and  what  must  it  have  seemed  to  the  poor  victim? — while 
Galbraith  bellowed  Larson's  lines  after  her,  sometimes  in 
grotesque  imitation  of  her  own  inflections,  sometimes  in  what 
was  meant  as  a  pattern  for  her  to  follow.  The  girl  whose  ear 
was  so  wonderfully  sensitive  to  pitch  and  rhythm,  was  simply 
deaf,  it  seemed,  to  the  subtleties  of  inflection.  She  reduced 
Galbraith  to  helpless  wrath,  in  her  panic,  by  mistaking  now 
and  again,  his  imitations  for  his  models.  The  chorus  tittered ; 
the  spectators  suffocated  their  guffaws  as  well  as  they  could. 
Patricia  grew  more  and  more  acutely  and  infuriatingly  ironic 
all  the  while. 

Evidently  Galbraith  didn't  mean  to  be  a  brute  about  it.  He 
began  every  one  of  these  tussles  to  improve  her  reading  of  a 
line,  with  a  gentleness  that  would  have  done  credit  to  a  kinder 
gartener.  But,  after  three  attempts,  each  more  ominously  gen 
tle  and  deliberate  than  the  last,  his  temper  would  suddenly  fly 
all  to  pieces.  " — Xo — no — no !"  he  would  roar  at  her,  and  the 
similes  his  exasperation  would  supply  him  with,  for  a  descrip 
tion  of  what  her  speech  was  like,  were  as  numerous  as  the 
acids  in  a  chemical  laboratory;  and  they  all  bit  and  burned 
just  as  hard. 

Rose  looked  on  with  rather  tepid  feelings.  She  sympathized 
with  Galbraith  on  the  whole.  The  poor  man  was  doing  his 
best ;  and  the  girl,  queerly,  didn't  seem  to  care.  She  confronted 
him  in  a  sort  of  stockish  stupidity,  saying  her  lines,  when  he 
told  her  to  try  again,  with  the  same  frightful  whang  he  was 


THE    GIRL   WITH   THE    BAD   VOICE        269 

doing  his  best  to  correct,  so  that  he  was  justified,  Rose  felt, 
in  accusing  her  of  not  trying,  or  even  listening  to  him. 

It  was  in  the  dressing-room  one  night,  after  one  of  these  re 
hearsals,  that  she  caught  a  different  view  of  the  situation.  She 
sat  down  on  a  bench  to  unlace  her  shoes  and  looked  straight 
into  Olga  Larson's  face — a  face  sunken  with  a  despair  that 
turned  Rose  cold  all  over.  The  tearless  tragic  eyes  were  star 
ing,  without  recognition,  straight  into  Rose's  own.  It  must 
be  with  faces  like  this  that  people  mounted  the  rails  on  the 
high  bridge  in  Lincoln  Park,  intent  on  leaving  a  world  that 
had  become  intolerable.  Packed  in  all  around  her  in  the  in 
adequate  dressing-room,  the  other  girls  were  chattering, 
squealing,  scrambling  into  their  clothes,  as  unaware  of  her 
tense  motionless  figure,  as  if  it  had  been  a  mere  inanimate 
lump.  She  couldn't  have  been  more  alone  if  she  had  been  sit 
ting  out  on  the  rock  of  Juan  Fernandez. 

Rose  invented  various  pretexts  to  delay  her  own  dressing 
until  the  other  girls  were  gone.  She  could  no  more  have 
abandoned  that  hopeless  creature  there,  than  she  could  have 
left  a  person  drowning.  When  they  had  the  room  to  them 
selves,  she  sat  dcwn  on  the  bench  beside  her. 

"You're  all  right,"  she  said,  feeling  rather  embarrassed  and 
inadequate  and  not  knowing  just  how  to  begin.  "I'm  going 
to  help  you." 

"It's  always  like  this,"  the  girl  said.  "It's  no  use.  He'll 
put  me  back  in  the  chorus  again." 

"Not  if  I  can  help  it,"  Rose  said.  "But  the  first  thing  to  do 
is  to  put  on  your  clothes.  Then  we'll  go  out  and  get  something 
to  eat." 

Even  that  little  beginning  involved  a  struggle — a  conscious 
exertion  of  all  the  power  Rose  possessed.  She  learned,  for  the 
first  time,  what  the  weight  of  an  immense  melancholy  inertia 
like  that  can  be.  The  girl  was  like  one  paralyzed.  She  was 
willing  enough  to  talk.  She  told  Rose  the  whole  story  of  her 
life;  not  as  one  making  confidences  to  a  friend;  rather  with 
the  curious  detachment  of  a  melancholy  spectator  discussing 
an  unfortunate  life  she  had  no  concern  with. 


270  THE    EEAL   ADVENTTJEE 

She  knew  how  good  her  voice  was,  and,  equally,  how  badly 
it  needed  training.  She'd  had,  always,  a  passionate  desire  to 
sing  and  a  belief  in  her  possibilities.  If  she  could  get  a  chance, 
she  could  succeed.  She'd  undergone  heartbreaking  privations, 
trying  to  save  money  enough  out  of  her  earnings  at  one  form 
of  toil  after  another,  to  take  lessons.  But,  repeatedly,  these 
small  savings  had,  by  some  disaster,  been  swept  away :  stolen 
once,  by  a  worthless  older  brother;  absorbed  on  another  occa 
sion  by  her  mother's  fatal  illness.  Two  years  ago  she  had 
drifted  into  the  chorus,  but  had  been  altogether  unlucky  in 
her  various  ventures.  She  wasn't  naturally  graceful — had 
been  slow  learning  to  dance.  Again  and  again,  she'd  been 
dropped  at  the  end  of  three  or  four  weeks  of  rehearsal  (gra 
tuitous  of  course)  and  seen  another  girl  put  in  her  place. 
When  this  hadn't  happened,  the  shows  she  had  been  in  had 
failed  after  a  few  weeks'  life. 

When  Galbraith  had  put  her  into  the  sextette  in  The  Girl 
Up-stairs,  a  hope,  just  about  dead,  had  been  awakened.  She'd 
at  last  learned  to  dance  well  enough  to  escape  censure  and  she 
had  seen  for  herself  how  indispensable  her  singing  voice  was 
to  the  group.  And  then  it  had  appeared  she'd  have  to  talk  1 
And,  inexplicably  to  herself,  her  talking  wasn't  right.  The 
thing  had  just  been  another  mirage.  It  was  hopeless.  Gal 
braith  would  put  her  back  into  the  chorus — drop  her,  likely 
enough,  altogether. 

The  thing  that  at  first  exasperated  Eose  and  later,  as  she 
came  vaguely  to  understand  it,  aroused  both  her  pity  and  her 
determination,  was  the  girl's  strange,  dully  fatalistic  acquies 
cence  in  it  all.  The  sort  of  circumstances  that  in  Eose  herself 
set  the  blood  drumming  through  her  arteries,  keyed  her  will 
to  the  very  highest  pitch,  quickened  her  brain,  made  her  feel 
in  some  inexplicable  way,  confident  and  irresistible,  laid  on 
this  girl  a  paralyzing  hand.  It  wasn't  her  fault  that  she 
didn't  meet  her  difficulties  half-way  with  a  vicious,  driving 
offensive — rout  them,  demoralize  them.  It  was  her  tragedy. 

"All  right,"  Eose  apostrophized  them  grimly.  "This  time 
you're  up  against  me." 

"Look  here  !"  she  said  to  Olga,  when  the  story  was  told  (this 


THE    GIRL   WITH   THE    BAD   VOICE        271 

was  across  the  table  in  the  dingy  luncli-room  where,  as  Doris 
Dane,  she  had  had  her  first  meal,  and  most  of  her  subsequent 
ones),  "look  here,  and  listen  to  what  I'm  going  to  tell  you.  I 
know  what  I'm  talking  about.  You're  going  to  learn  to  say 
your  lines  before  to-morrow's  rehearsal,  so  that  Mr.  .  .  . 
So  that  Galbraith  won't  stop  you  once."  (This  was  a  trick  of 
speech  that  came  hard  to  Rose,  but  she  was  gradually  learning 
it. )  "We're  going  up  to  my  room  now,  and  I'm  going  to  teach 
you.  We've  got  lots  of  time.  Rehearsal  to-morrow  isn't  till 
twelve  o'clock.  You're  going  to  stay  in  the  sextette,  and  when 
the  piece  opens,  you're  going  to  make  a  hit." 

She  hesitated  a  moment,  then  added  in  the  same  blunt  mat 
ter-of-fact  way,  "You're  one  of  the  most  beautiful  women 
in  Chicago.  Did  you  know  that  ?  Dressed  right  and  with  your 
hair  done  right,  you  could  make  them  stare.  Have  you  fin 
ished  your  coffee  ?  Then  come  along.  Here !  Give  me  your 
part.  You  don't  want  to  lose  it." 

For  the  girl,  pitiably,  almost  ludicrously,  was  staring  at 
Rose  in  a  sort  of  somnambulistic  daze.  She  hadn't  been  hyp 
notized,  but  she  might  about  as  well  have  been,  for  any  real 
resistance  her  mind,  or  her  will,  could  offer  to  her  new  friend's 
vibrant  confidence. 

She  went  with  Rose  up  to  the  little  three-dollar  room.  Rose 
put  her  into  a  chair,  sat  down  opposite  her,  took  the  first 
phrase  of  her  first  speech,  and  said  it  ven^  slowly,  very  quietly, 
half  a  dozen  times.  That  was  at  half  past  eleven  o'clock  at 
night.  By  midnight,  Olga  could  say  those  first  three  words,  if 
not  to  Rose's  complete  satisfaction,  at  least  a  lot  better.  She 
went  on  and  finished  the  sentence.  They  worked  straight 
through  the  night,  except  that  two  or  three  times  the  girl  broke 
down ;  said  it  was  hopeless.  She  got  up  once  and  said  that  she 
was  going  home,  whereupon  Rose  locked  the  door  and  put  the 
key  in  her  stocking.  She  sulked  once,  and  for  fifteen  minutes 
wouldn't  say  a  word.  But  by  seven  o'clock  in  the  morning, 
when  they  went  back  to  the  lunch-room  and  ate  an  enormous 
breakfast,  Olga's  sluggish  blood  was  fired  at  last,  It  was  a  pro 
fane  thought,  but  you  could  take  the  Fatal  Sisters  by  the  hair 
and  coerce  a  change  in  the  pattern  they  were  weaving. 


273  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

And  Rose,  by  that  time,  by  the  plain  brute  force  of  necessity, 
was  a  teacher  of  phonetics.  She'd  discovered  how  she  made 
sounds  herself  and  had,  with  the  aid  of  a  hand  mirror,  devel 
oped  a  rough-and-ready  technique  for  demonstrating  how  it 
was  done.  She  remembered,  with  bitter  regret,  a  course  she 
had  dozed  through  at  the  university,  dreaming  about  the  half 
back,  which,  had  she  only  listened  to  the  professor  instead, 
would  be  doing  her  solid  service  now.  Had  there  been  other 
courses  like  that,  she  wondered  vaguely?  Had  the  education 
she  had  spent  fifteen  years  or  so  on  an  actual  relation  to  life 
after  all  ?  It  was  a  startling  idea. 

She  walked  Olga  out  to  the  park  and  back  at  seven-thirty, 
and  at  eight  they  were  up  in  her  room  again.  They  raided  the 
delicatessen  at  eleven  o'clock,  and  made  an  exiguous  meal  on 
the  plunder.  And  at  twelve,  husky  of  voice,  but  indomitable 
of  mind,  they,  with  the  others,  confronted  Galbraith  upon  the 
stage  in  North  End  Hall. 

"Do  you  suppose,"  Olga  said  during  the  preliminary  bustle 
of  getting  started,  "that  he's  put  any  one  else  in  my  part  al 
ready?" 

It  was  a  fear  Rose  had  entertained,  but  had  avoided  suggest 
ing  to  her  pupil. 

"I  don't  believe  so,"  she  said.   "If  he  has,  I'll  talk  to  him." 

"No,  you  won't!"  said  Olga.    "I'll  talk  to  him  myself." 

There  was  a  ring  to  that  decision  that  did  Rose's  heart  good. 
It  took  a  long  time  to  get  that  northern  blood  on  fire,  but 
when  you  did,  you  could  count  on  its  not  going  cold  again 
overnight. 

It  got  pretty  exciting  of  course,  as  the  scene  between  Sylvia 
and  the  sextette  drew  near,  and  when  it  came,  Rose  could 
hardly  manage  her  own  first  line — hung  over  it  a  second,  in 
deed,  before  she  could  make  her  voice  work  at  all,  and  drew  a 
sharp  look  of  inquiry  from  Galbraith.  But  on  Olga's  first  cue, 
her  line  was  spoken  with  no  hesitation  at  all,  and  in  tone,  pitch 
and  inflection,  it  was  almost  a  phonographic  copy  of  the  voice 
that  had  served  it  for  a  model. 

There  was  a  solid  two  seconds  of  silence.  For  once  in  her 
life  Patricia  Devereux  had  missed  a  cue ! 

John  Galbraith  had  been  an  acrobat  as  well  as  a  dancer, 


THE    GIRL   WITH   THE    BAD   VOICE        2?3 

and  he  was  quick  on  his  feet.  He  had  just  turned,  unexpect 
edly,  an  intellectual  somersault,  but  he  landed  cleanly  and 
without  a  stagger.  "Come,  Miss  Devereux,"  he  said,  "that's 
your  line."  And  the  scene  went  on. 

But  when,  about  four  o'clock  that  afternoon,  the  rehearsal 
was  over,  Galbraith  called  Olga  out  to  him  and  allowed  him 
self  a  long  incredulous  stare  at  her.  "Will  you  tell  me,  Lar 
son,"  lie  asked,  "why  in  the  name  of  Heaven,  if  you  could 
do  that,  you  didn't  do  it  }'esterday?" 

"I  couldn't  do  it  yesterday,"  she  said.   "Dane  taught  me." 

"Taught  you !"  he  echoed.  "Beginning  after  last  night's  re 
hearsal  ?  .  .  .  Dane !"  he  called  to  Rose,  who  had  been 
watching  a  little  anxiously  to  see  what  would  happen. 

"You've  learned  it  very  well  indeed,"  he  said  with  a  nod 
of  dismissal  to  Olga,  as  Rose  came  up.  "Don't  try  to  change 
it.  Stick  to  what  you've  got." 

Then,  to  Rose,  "Larson  tells  me  you  taught  her.  How  did 
you  do  it?" 

"Why,  I  just — taught  her,"  said  Rose.  "I  showed  her  how 
I  said  each  line,  and  I  kept  on  showing  her  until  she  could 
do  it." 

"How  long  did  it  take  you — all  night  ?" 

"All  the  time  there's  been  since  last  rehearsal,"  said  Rose, 
"except  for  three  meals." 

"Good  God !"  said  Galbraith.  "Devereux  said  it  couldn't  be 
done,  and  I  agreed  with  her.  Well,  live  and  learn.  Look  here ! 
Will  you  teach  the  others — the  other  four  in  the  sextette  ?  I'll 
see  you're  paid  for  it." 

"Why,  yes, — of  course,"  said  Rose,  hesitating  a  little. 

"Oh,  I  don't  mean  overnight,"  he  said,  "but  mornings — be 
tween  rehearsals — whenever  you  can." 

"I  wasn't  thinking  of  that,"  said  Rose.  "I  was  just  won 
dering  if  they'd  want  to  be  taught — I  mean,  by  another  chorus- 
girl,  you  know." 

"They'll  want  to  be  taught  if  they  want  to  keep  their  jobs," 
said  Galbraith.  And  then,  to  her  astonishment,  and  also  per 
haps  to  his,  for  the  thing  was  radically  out  of  the  etiquette  of 
the  occasion,  he  reached  out  and  shook  hands  with  her.  "I'm 
very  much  obliged  to  you,"  he  said. 


CHAPTER  V 

MRS.  GOLDSMITH'S  TASTE 

IF  there  was  a  profession  in  the  world  which  Eose  had  never 
either  idly  or  seriously  considered  as  a  possible  one  for  herself, 
that  of  a  teacher  was  it.  And  yet,  the  first  money  she  ever 
earned  in  her  life  was  the  twenty  dollars  the  management  paid 
her  for  teaching  the  other  four  girls  in  the  sextette  to  say  their 
lines.  She  was  a  born  teacher,  too.  And  the  born  teacher  is 
a  rare  bird. 

One  must  know  something  in  the  first  place,  of  course,  be 
fore  one  can  teach  it — a  fact  that  has  resulted  in  the  fitting 
of  an  enormous  number  of  square  pegs  into  round  holes.  Most 
of  the  people  in  the  world  who  are  trying  to  teach,  are  those 
whose  aptitude  is  for  learning.  But  the  scholar's  temper  and 
the  teacher's  are  antipodal;  a  salient,  vivid  personality  that 
can  command  attention,  the  unconscious  will  to  conquer — to 
enforce  (a  very  different  thing  from  the  wish  to  do  these 
things)  that  is  the  sine  qua  non  for  a  real  teacher.  And  that, 
of  course,  was  Eose  all  over. 

Those  four  sulky,  rather  supercilious  chorus-girls,  coming 
to  Eose  under  a  threat  of  dismissal,  for  lessons  in  the  one  last 
thing  that  a  free-born  American  will  submit  to  dictation 
about,  might  not  want  to  learn,  nor  mean  to  learn,  but  they 
couldn't  help  learning.  You  couldn't  be  unaware  of  Eose  and, 
being  aware  of  her,  you  couldn't  resist  doing  things,  as  she 
wanted  you  to. 

Informally,  too,  she  taught  them  other  things  than  speech. 
"Here,  Waldron !"  G  albraith  would  say.  "This  is  no  cake- 
walk.  All  you've  got  to  do  is  to  cross  to  that  chair  and  sit 
down  in  it  like  a  lady.  Show  her  how  to  do  it,  Dane."  And 
Eose,  with  her  good-humored  disarming  smile  at  the  infuri 
ated  Waldron,  would  go  ahead  and  do  it. 

I  won't  pretend  that  she  was  a  favorite  with  the  other  mem- 


MRS.    GOLDSMITH'S    TASTE  275 

bcrs  o.f  the  sextette,  barring  Olga.  But  she  managed  to  avoid 
being  cordially  hated,  which  was  a  very  solid  personal  triumph. 

I  have  said  that  there  were  two  small  incidents  destined  to 
have  a  powerful  influence  at  this  time,  in  Rose's  life.  One  of 
them  I  have  told  you  about — the  chance  that  led  her  to  teach 
Olga  Larson  to  talk.  The  other  concerned  itself  with  a  certain 
afternoon  frock  in  a  Michigan  Avenue  shop. 

The  owners  of  The  Girl  Up-stairs  were  very  inadequately 
experienced  in  the  business  of  putting  on  musical  comedies. 
Galbraith  spoke  of  them  as  amateurs,  and  couldn't,  really, 
have  described  them  better.  Your  professional  gambler — for 
musical-comedy  producing  is  an  especially  sporting  form  of 
gambling  and  nothing  else — assesses  his  chances  in  advance, 
decides  coolly  whether  they  are  worth  taking  or  not,  and  then, 
with  a  steely  indifference  awaits  the  event.  The  amateur,  on 
the  contrary,  is  always  fluttering  between  an  insane  confidence 
and  a  shuddering  despair;  between  a  reckless  disregard  of 
money  and  a  foolish  attempt  to  save  it.  It  had  been  in  one 
of  their  hot  fits  that  the  owners  of  The  Girl  Up-stairs  had  re 
tained  Galbraith.  The  news  item  Rose  had  read  had  not  ex 
ceeded  truth  in  saying  that  he  was  one  of  the  three  greatest 
directors  in  the  country.  They  couldn't  have  got  him  out  to 
Chicago  at  all  but  for  the  chance  that  he  was,  just  then,  at 
the  end  of  a  long-time  contract  with  the  Shumans  and  hold 
ing  off  for  better  terms  before  he  signed  a  new  one.  The  own 
ers  were  staggered  at  the  prices  they  had  to  pay  him,  at  that, 
but  they  recovered  and  were  still  blowing  warm  when  they 
authorized  him  to  engage  Devereux,  Stewart,  Astor  and  Me- 
Gill  (McGill  was  the  chief  comedian,  the  Cosmetic  King)  for 
all  of  these  were  high-priced  people. 

But  by  the  time  the  question  of  costumes  came  up,  they 
were  shivering  in  a  perfect  ague  of  apprehension.  Was  there 
no  limit  to  the  amount  they  were  to  be  asked  to  spend  ?  This 
figure  that  Galbraith  indicated  as  the  probable  cost  of  having 
a  first-class  brigand  in  New  York  design  the  costumes  and  a 
firm  of  pirates  in  the  same  neighborhood  execute  them,  was 
simply  insane.  New  York  managers  might  be  boobs  enough  to 
submit  to  such  an  extortion,  but  they,  believe  them,  were  not. 


276  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

Many  of  the  costumes  could  be  bought,  ready  made,  on  State 
Street  or  Michigan  Avenue.  Some  of  the  fancy  things  could 
be  executed  by  a  competent  wardrobe  mistress^  if  some  one 
would  give  her  the  ideas.  And  ideas — one  could  pick  them 
up  anywhere.  Mrs.  Goldsmith,  now, — she  was  the  wife  of  the 
senior  of  the  two  owners — had  splendid  taste  and  would  be 
glad  to  put  it  at  their  service.  There  was  no  reason  why  she 
should  not  at  once  take  the  sextette  down-town  and  fit  them 
out  with  their  dresses. 

Galbraith  shrugged  his  shoulders,  but  made  no  further  com 
plaint.  It  was,  he  admitted,  as  they  had  repeatedly  pointed 
out,  their  own  money.  So  a  rendezvous  was  made  between  Mrs. 
Goldsmith  and  the  sextette  for  Lessing's  store  on  Michigan 
Avenue  at  three  o'clock  on  an  afternoon  when  Galbraith  was 
to  be  busy  with  the  principals.  He  might  manage  to  drop  in 
before  they  left  to  cast  his  eye  over  and  approve  the  selection. 

It  was  with  some  rather  uncomfortable  misgivings  that  Rose 
set  out  to  revisit  a  part  of  town  so  closely  associated  with  the 
first  year  of  her  married  life.  The  particular  shop  wasn't, 
luckily,  one  that  she  had  patronized  in  that  former  incarna 
tion.  But  it  was  in  the  same  block  with  a  half  dozen  that 
were,  and  she  hadn't  been  east  of  Clark  Street  since  the  day 
Otto  had  driven  her  to  the  Polk  Street  Station. 

The  day  was  cold  and  blustery — a  fact  that  she  was  grateful 
for,  as  it  gave  her  an  excuse  for  wearing  a  thick  white  veil, 
which  was  almost  as  good  as  a  mask.  It  was  with  a  rather 
breathless  excitement  that  persisted  in  feeling  like  guilt — her 
heart  wouldn't  have  beaten  any  faster,  she  believed,  if  she  had 
just  robbed  a  jewelry  store  and  were  walking  away  with  the 
swag  in  her  pocket — that  she  debouched  out  of  Van  Buren 
Street,  around  the  corner  of  the  Chicago  Club,  and  into  the 
avenue.  Unconsciously,  she  had  been  expecting  to  meet  every 
one  she  knew,  beginning  with  Frederica,  in  the  course  of  the 
two  blocks  or  so  she  had  to  walk.  Very  naturally,  she  didn't 
catch  even  a  glimpse  of  any  one  she  even  remotely  knew. 
Suppose  there  should  be  any  one  in  the  store !  But  this,  she 
realized,  wasn't  likely. 

It  wasn't  a  really  smart  shop.   It  paid  an  enormous  rent 


MRS.    GOLDSMITH'S    TASTE  OT 

there  in  that  neighborhood  in  order  to  pretend  to  be,  and  the 
gowns  on  the  wax  figures  in  its  windows,  were  taken  on  faith 
by  pleasurably  scandalized  pedestrians  as  the  very  latest 
scream  of  fashion.  The  prices  on  these  confections  were  al 
ways  in  the  process  of  a  violent  reduction,  as  large  exclama 
tory  placards  grievously  testified.  The  legend  eighty-eight 
dollars  crossed  out  in  red  lines,  with  thirty-nine  seventy-five 
written  below,  for  a  sample.  The  most  exclusive  smartness 
for  the  economy-loving  multitude.  This  was  the  slogan. 

Rose,  arriving  promptly  at  the  hour  agreed  on,  had  a  wait 
of  fifteen  minutes  before  any  of  her  sisters  of  the  sextette,  or 
Mrs.  Goldsmith  arrived.  She  told  the  suave  manager  that  she 
was  waiting  for  friends,  but  this  didn't  deter  him  from  em 
ploying  a  magnificent  wave  of  the  hand  to  summon  one  of  the 
saleswomen  and  consigning  Rose  almost  tenderly,  to  her  care. 
He  didn't  know  her,  but  he  knew  that  that  ulster  of  hers 
had  come  straight  over  from  Paris,  had  cost  not  less  than  two 
hundred  dollars,  and  had  been  selected  by  an  excellently  dis 
criminating  eye ;  and  that  was  enough  for  him. 

"I  don't  want  anything  just  now,"  Rose  told  the  saleswoman. 
But  she  hadn't,  in  these  few  weeks  of  Clark  Street,  lost  the  air 
of  one  who  will  buy  if  she  sees  anything  worth  buying.  In 
fact,  the  saleswoman  thought,  correctly,  that  she  knew  her  and 
was  in  for  a  shock  a  little  later  when  Mrs.  Goldsmith  and  the 
other  five  members  of  the  sextette  arrived. 

Meanwhile,  she  showed  Rose  the  few  really  smart  things 
they  had  in  the  store — a  Poiret  evening  gown,  a  couple  of  aft 
ernoon  frocks  from  Jennie,  and  so  on.  There  wasn't  much,  she 
admitted,  it  being  just  between  seasons.  Their  Palm  Beach 
things  weren't  in  yet. 

Rose  made  a  few  appreciative,  but  decidedly  respect-com 
pelling  comments,  and  faithfully  kept  one  eye  on  the  door. 

The  rest  of  the  sextette  arrived  in  a  pair  and  a  trio.  One 
of  them  squealed,  "Hello,  Dane !"  The  saleswoman  got  her 
shock  on  seeing  Rose  nod  an  acknowledgment  of  this  greeting 
and  just  about  that  time,  they  heard  Mrs.  Goldsmith  explain 
ing  who  she  was  and  the  nature  of  her  errand,  to  the  manager. 
The  necessary  identifications  got  themselves  made  somehow. 


2T8  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

They  weren't  in  any  sense  introductions,  everybody  in  the  store 
felt  that  plainly.  Mrs.  Goldsmith  was  touching  the  skirts  of 
musical  comedy  with  a  very  long  pair  of  tongs.  There  was 
absolutely  no  connection,  social  or  personal,  between  herself 
and  the  young  persons  who  were  to  wear  the  frocks  she  was 
going  to  buy. 

She  stood  them  up  and  stared  at  them  through  her  eye 
glasses,  discussed  their  various  physical  idiosyncrasies  with 
candor,  and,  one  by  one,  packed  them  off  to  try  on  haphazard 
selections  from  the  mounds  which  three  industrious  sales 
women  piled  up  before  her.  You  couldn't  deny  her  the  posses 
sion  of  a  certain  force  of  character,  for  not  one  of  the  six  girls 
uttered  a  word  of  suggestion  or  of  protest. 

And  the  sort  of  gowns  she  was  exclaiming  over  with  delight 
and  ordering  put  into  the  heap  of  possibilities,  were  horrible 
enough  to  have  drawn  a  protest  from  the  wax  figures  in  the 
windows.  The  more  completely  the  fundamental  lines  of  a 
frock  were  disguised  with  sartorial  scroll-saw  work,  the  more 
successful  this  lady  felt  it  to  be.  An  ornament,  to  Mrs.  Gold 
smith,  did  not  live  up  to  its  possibilities,  unless  it  in  turn 
were  decorated  with  ornaments  of  its  own ;  like  the  fleas  on  the 
fleas  on  the  dog. 

It  is  a  tribute  to  one  of  the  qualities  that  made  John  Gal- 
braith  a  successful  director,  that  Rose  spent  a  miserable  half- 
hour  worrying  over  these  selections  of  the  wife  of  the  principal 
owner  of  the  show,  feeling  she  ought  to  put  up  some  sort  of 
fight  and  hardly  deterred  by  the  patent  futility  of  such  a 
course.  To  rest  her  esthetic  senses  from  the  delirium  of  fussi- 
ness  that  was  giving  Mrs.  Goldsmith  so  much  pleasure,  she 
began  thinking  about  that  Poiret  frock — the  superb  simple 
audacity  of  it !  It  had  been  made  by  an  artist  who  knew  where 
to  stop.  And  he  had  stopped  rather  incredibly  soon.  Just  sup 
pose  .  .  .  And  then  her  eyes  lighted  up,  gazed  thought 
fully  out  the  window  across  the  wind-swept  desert  of  the 
avenue,  and,  presently  she  grinned — widely,  contentedly. 

For  the  next  hour  and  a  half,  during  the  intervals  of  her 
own  trying  on,  she  entertained  herself  very  happily  with  the 
day-dream  that  she  herself  had  a  commission  to  design  the  cos- 


MRS.    GOLDSMITH'S    TASTE  279 

tumes  for  The  Girl  Up-stairs.  She  had  always  done  that  more 
or  less,  she  realized,  when  she  went  to  musical-comedy  shows 
with  Rodney,  especially  when  they  were  badly  costumed.  But 
this  time  she  did  it  a  good  deal  more  vividly,  partly  because 
her  interest  in  the  piece  was  more  intense,  partly  because  her 
imagination  had  a  blank  canvas  to  work  on. 

All  the  while,  like  Sister  Anne  in  the  tower,  she  kept  one 
eye  on  the  door  and  prayed  for  the  arrival  of  John  Galbraith. 

He  came  in  just  as  Mrs.  Goldsmith  finished  her  task — just 
when,  by  a  process  of  studious  elimination,  every  passable 
thing  in  the  store  had  been  discarded  and  the  twelve  most  ut 
terly  hopeless  ones — two  for  each  girl — laid  aside  for  pur 
chase.  The  girls  were  despatched  to  put  on  the  evening  frocks 
first,  and  were  then  paraded  before  the  director. 

He  was  a  diplomat  as  I  have  said  (possibly  I  spoke  of  him 
before  as  an  acrobat.  It  comes  to  the  same  thing),  and  he 
was  quick  on  his  feet.  Rose,  watching  his  face  very  closely, 
thought  that  for  just  a  split  second,  she  caught  a  gleam  of 
ineffable  horror.  But  it  was  gone  so  quickly  she  could  almost 
have  believed  that  she  had  been  mistaken.  He  didn't  say  much 
about  the  costumes,  but  he  said  it  so  promptly  and  adequately 
that  Mrs.  Goldsmith  beamed  with  pride.  She  sent  the  girls 
away  to  put  on  the  other  set — the  afternoon  frocks,  and  once 
more  the  director's  approbation,  though  laconic,  was  one  hun 
dred  per  cent.  pure. 

"That's  all,"  lie  said  in  sudden  dismissal  of  the  sextette. 
"Rehearsal  at  eight-thirty/' 

Five  of  them  scurried  like  children  let  out  of  school,  around 
behind  the  set  of  screens  that  made  an  extemporaneous  dress 
ing-room,  and  began  changing  in  a  mad  scramble,  hoping  to 
get  away  and  to  get  their  dinners  eaten  soon  enough  to  enable 
them  to  see  the  whole  bill  at  a  movie  show  before  the  evening's 
rehearsal. 

But  Rose  didn't  avail  herself  of  her  dismissal — remained 
hanging  about,  a  couple  of  paces  away  from  where  Galbraith 
was  talking  to  Mrs.  Goldsmith.  The  only  question  that  re 
mained,  he  was  telling  her,  was  whether  her  selections  were 
not  too — well,  too  refined,  genteel,  one  might  say,  for  the 


280  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

stage.  Regretfully  lie  confessed  lie  was  a  little  afraid  they 
were.  It  needed  a  certain  crudity  to  withstand  the  glare  of 
the  footlights  and  until  these  gowns  had  been  submitted  to 
that  glare,  one  couldn't  be  sure. 

He  wasn't  looking  at  her  as  he  talked,  and  presently,  as  his 
gaze  wandered  about  the  store,  it  encountered  Rose's  face.  She 
hadn't  prepared  it  for  the  encounter,  and  it  wore,  hardly  veiled, 
a  look  of  humorous  appreciation.  His  sentence  broke,  then 
completed  itself.  She  turned  away,  but  the  next  moment  he 
called  out  to  her,  "Were  you  waiting  for  me,  Dane?" 

"I'd  like  to  speak  to  you  a  minute,"  she  said,  "when  you 
have  time." 

"All  right.  Go  and  change  your  clothes  first,"  he  said. 

Out  of  the  tail  of  her  eye  as  she  departed,  she  saw  him  shak 
ing  hands  with  the  owner's  wife  and  thanking  her  effusively 
for  her  help.  Incidentally,  he  was  leading  her  toward  the  door 
as  he  did  it.  And  at  the  door,  he  declined  an  offer  to  be  taken 
anywhere  he  might  want  to  go  in  her  electric. 

She  found  the  other  girls  on  the  point  of  departure.  But 
Olga  offered  to  wait  for  her. 

"No,  you  run  along,"  Rose  said.  "I've  some  errands  and  I 
don't  feel  like  seeing  a  movie  to-night,  anyway." 

Olga  looked  a  little  odd  about  it,  but  hurried  along  after  the 
others. 

A  saleswoman — the  same  one  the  manager  assigned  to  Rose 
under  the  misconception  which  that  smart  French  ulster  of 
hers  had  created  when  she  came  into  the  store — now  came 
around  behind  the  screen  to  gather  up  the  frocks  the  girls  had 
shed. 

"Will  you  please  bring  me,"  said  Rose,  "that  Poiret  model 
you  showed  me  before  the  others  came  in  ?  I'll  try  it  on." 

The  saleswoman's  manner  was  different  now  and  she  grum 
bled  something  about  its  being  closing  time. 

"Then,  if  you'll  bring  it  at  once  .  .  ."  said  Rose.  And 
the  saleswoman  went  on  the  errand. 

Five  minutes  later,  Galbraith  from  staring  gloomily  at  the 
mournful  heap  of  trouble  Mrs.  Goldsmith  had  left  on  his 
hands,  looked  up  to  confront  a  vision  that  made  him  gasp. 


MRS.    GOLDSMITH'S    TASTE  281 

"I  wanted  you  to  see  if  you  liked  this,"  said  Eose. 

"If  I  liked  it!"  he  echoed.  "Look  here!  If  you  know 
enough  to  pick  out  things  like  that,  why  did  you  let  that 
woman  waste  everybody's  time  with  junk  like  this?  Why 
didn't  you  help  her  out  ?" 

"I  couldn't  have  done  much,"  Rose  said,  "even  if  my  offer 
ing  to  do  anything  hadn't  made  her  angry — and  I  think  it 
would  have.  You  see,  she's  got  lots  of  taste,  only  it's  bad 
She  wasn't  bewildered  a  bit.  She  knew  just  what  she  wanted 
and  she  got  it.  It's  the  badness  of  these  things  she  likes. 
And  I  thought  .  .  ."  She  hesitated  a  little  over  this.  "I 
thought  as  long  as  they  couldn't  be  good,  perhaps  the  next 
best  thing  would  be  to  have  them  as  bad  as  possible.  I  mean 
that  it  would  be  easier  to  throw  them  all  out  and  get  a  fresh 
start." 

He  stared  at  her  with  a  frown  of  curiosity.  "That's  good 
sense,"  he  said.  "But  how  did  you  come  to  think  of  it  ? — Oh, 
I  don't  mean  that !"  he  went  on  impatiently.  "Why  should 
you  bother  to  think  of  it?" 

Her  color  came  up  perceptibly  as  she  answered.  "Why — I 
want  the  piece  to  succeed,  of  course.  I  was  awfully  miserable 
when  I  saw  the  sort  of  things  she  was  picking  out  and  I  spent 
half  an  hour  trying  to  think  what  I  could  do  about  it.  And 
then  I  saw  that  the  best  thing  I  could  do,  was  nothing." 

"You  didn't  do  nothing  though,"  he  said.  "That  thing 
you've  got  on  is  a  start." 

Rose  turned  rather  suddenly  to  the  saleswoman.  "I  wish 
you'd  get  that  little  Empire  frock  in  maize  and  corn-flower," 
she  said.  "I'd  like  Mr.  Galbraith  to  see  that,  too."  And  the 
saleswoman,  now  placated,  bustled  away. 

"This  thing  that  I've  got  on,"  said  Rose  swiftly,  "costs  a 
hundred  and  fifty  dollars,  but  I  know  I  can  copy  it  for 
twenty.  I  can't  get  the  materials  exactly  of  course,  but  I 
can  come  near  enough." 

"Will  you  try  this  one  on,  miss?"  asked  the  saleswoman, 
coming  on  the  scene  again  with  the  frock  she  had  been  sent 
for. 

"No,"  said  Rose.    "Just  hold  it  up." 


282  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

Galbraith  admitted  it  was  beautiful,  but  wasn't  overwhelmed 
at  all  as  he  had  been  by  the  other. 

"It's  not  quite  so  much  your  style,  is  it?  Not  drive 
enough  ?" 

"It  isn't  for  me,"  said  Rose.  "It's  for  Olga  Larson  to 
wear  in  that  All  Alone  number  for  the  sextette." 

"Why  Larson  especially?"  he  asked.  "Except  that  she's  a 
friend  of  yours." 

"She  isn't,"  said  Rose,  "particularly.  And  anyway,  that 
wouldn't  be  a  reason.  But — did  you  ever  really  look  at  her? 
She's  the  one  really  beautiful  woman  in  the  company." 

"Larson?"  said  John  Galbraith  incredulously. 

And  Rose,  with  a  flush  and  a  smile  partly  deprecatory  over 
her  presumption  in  venturing  to  say  such  things  to  a  formi 
dable  authority  like  the  director,  and  partly  the  result  of  an 
exciting  conviction  that  she  was  right,  told  him  her  mind  on 
the  subject,  while  Galbraith,  half  fascinated,  half  amused, 
listened. 

"I  don't  happen  to  remember  the  portrait  of  the  Honorable 
Mrs.  Graham  that  you  speak  about,"  he  said,  "but  I  won't 
deny  that  you  may  be  right  about  it." 

It  was  well  after  closing  time  by  now — a  fact  that  the  man 
ager,  coming  to  reinforce  the  saleswoman,  contrived,  without 
saying  so,  to  indicate. 

"Put  on  your  street  things,"  said  Galbraith  bruskly.  "I'll 
wait." 


CHAPTER  VI 

A   BUSINESS 


"WiiY,  this  was  what  I  wanted  to  say,"  said  Rose,  taking  up 
the  broken  conversation  as  he  pulled  the  shop  door  to  behind 
him.  She  didn't  go  out  on  to  the  sidewalk,  but  lingered  in 
the  recessed  doorway.  "I  thought  if  you'd  let  me  fake  that 
evening  frock  for  twenty  dollars,  and  then  buy  the  little 
Empire  one  for  Olga  Larson  —  it's  only  eighty  —  that  the  two 
would  average  just  about  what  Mrs.  Goldsmith  was  paying 
for  the  others." 

"Why  not  fake  the  other  one  too  ?"  he  asked. 

"It  couldn't  be  done,"  said  Rose  decisively.  "There's  no 
idea  in  it,  you  see,  that  just  jumps  out  and  catches  you.  It 
gets  its  style  from  being  so  —  reserved  and  so  just  exactly 
right.  And  of  course  that's  true  of  the  girl  herself.  She's 
perfect,  just  about.  But  it's  a  perfection  that  it's  awfully  easy 
to  kill.  She  kills  it  herself  by  the  way  she  does  her  hair." 

Buzzing  around  in  the  back  of  John  Galbraith's  mind  was 
an  unworded  protest  against  the  way  Rose  had  just  killed 
her  own  beauty  with  a  thick  white  veil  so  nearly  opaque  that 
all  it  let  him  see  of  her  face  was  an  intermittent  gleam  of 
her  eyes.  Keenly  aware  —  a  good  deal  more  keenly  aware 
than  he  was  willing  to  admit  —  of  the  sort  of  splendor  which, 
but  for  the  veil,  he'd  be  looking  at  now,  a  splendor  which 
nothing  short  of  a  complete  mask  could  hide,  he  was  not  quite 
in  the  mood  to  wax  enthusiastic  over  a  beauty  so  fragile 
as  that  of  the  girl  they  had  been  talking  about.  There  was  a 
momentary  silence,  broken  again,  by  Rose. 

"Of  course,  you'll  want  to  take  a  look  at  her  for  yourself, 
before  you  decide,"  she  said  ;  "but  I'm  pretty  sure  you'll  see 
it."  She  put  a  cadence  of  finality  into  her  voice.  The  busi 
ness  between  them  was  over,  it  said,  and  all  she  was  waiting 

283 


284  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

for  was  a  word  of  dismissal,  to  nod  him  a  farewell  and  go 
swinging  away  down  the  avenue.  Still  he  didn't  speak,  and 
she  moved  a  little  restlessly.  At  last : — 

"Do  you  mind  crossing  the  street?"  he  asked  abruptly. 
"Then  we  can  talk  as  we  walk  along."  She  must  have  hesi 
tated,  because  he  added,  "It's  too  cold  to  stand  here." 

"Of  course,"  she  said  then.  All  that  had  made  her  hesi 
tate  was  her  surprise  over  his  having  made  a  request  instead 
of  giving  an  order. 

Galbraith  turned  her  north  on  the  vast  empty  east  side 
walk — a  highway  in  itself  broader  than  many  a  famous  Euro 
pean  street,  and  they  walked  a  little  way  in  silence. 

No  observant  Chicagoan,  Eose  reflected,  need  ever  yearn 
for  the  wastes  of  the  Sahara  when  a  desire  for  solitude  or 
the  need  of  privacy  came  upon  him.  The  east  side  of  Michi 
gan  Avenue  was  just  as  solitary  and  despite  the  difficulty 
of  getting  across  to  it,  really  a  good  deal  more  accessible.  The 
west  side  was  one  unbroken  glow  of  light  and  though  the 
Christmas  crowds  had  thinned  somewhat  with  the  closing  of 
the  shops,  they  were  still  thick  enough  to  have  made  it 
difficult  for  two  people  to  walk  and  talk  together.  A  quad 
ruple  stream  of  motors,  bellowing  warnings  at  one  another, 
roaring  with  suddenly  opened  throttles,  squealing  under  sud 
den  applications  of  the  brake,  opcupied  the  roadway  and 
served  more  than  the  mere  distance  would  have  done,  to 
isolate  the  pair  that  had  the  east  sidewalk  all  to  themselves. 

He  couldn't  be  looking  for  a  better  place  to  talk  than  this, 
Eose  thought.  Why  didn't  he  begin?  Probably  he'd  got 
started  thinking  about  something  else.  A  motor  coming  along 
near  the  curb  emitted  a  particularly  wanton  bellow,  and  she 
saw  him  jump  like  a  nervous  woman,  then  stand  still  and 
glare  after  the  offender.  He  must  be  feeling  specially  irri 
table  to-night,  she  thought. 

It  was  a  good  diagnosis.  And  his  irritation  had,  for  him, 
a  most  unusual  cause.  Chorus-girls,  principals,  owners, 
authors,  costumers,  were  frequently  the  objects  of  his  ex 
asperated  dissatisfaction.  But  to-night  the  person  he  was  out 
of  all  patience  with  was  himself.  He  couldn't  make  up  his 


A    BUSINESS    PROPOSITION  285 

mind  what  he  wanted  to  do.  Or  rather,  knowing  what  he 
wanted  to  do,  he  couldn't  make  up  his  mind  to  do  it.  It  was 
this  indecision  of  his  that  had  produced  the  silence  while  he 
and  Rose  had  stood  in  the  entrance  to  Lessing's  store.  The 
only  resolution  he  had  come  to  there  had  been  not  to  allow 
her  to  say  good  night  to  him  and  walk  away.  But  now  that 
she  was  striding  along  beside  him,  he  couldn't  make  up  his 
mind  what  to  say  to  her. 

A  more  self-conscious  man  would  have  forgiven  himself 
his  indecision  from  recognizing  the  real  complexities  of  the 
case.  He  was,  to  begin  with,  an  artist — almost  a  great  artist. 
And  a  universal  characteristic  of  such  is  a  complete  detach 
ment  from  the  materials  in  which  they  work — a  sort  of  re- 
morselessness  in  the  use  of  anything  that  can  contribute  to 
their  complete  expression.  The  raw  materials  of  John  Gal- 
braith/s  art  were  paint  and  canvas,  fabrics,  tunes,  men  and 
women.  It  was  an  axiom  in  his  experience,  that  any  personal 
feeling — any  sort  of  human  relation  with  one  of  the  units  in 
the  mosaic  he  was  building — was  to  be  avoided  like  the  plague. 
His  professional  and  personal  contempt  for  a  colleague  cap 
able  of  a  love-affair  with  a  woman  in  a  company  he  was  direct 
ing,  would  be  inexpressible — unfathomable.  Of  course  when 
a  man's  job  was  finished — and  this  sort  of  job  nearly  always 
did  finish  on  the  opening  night — why,  after  that,  his  affairs 
were  his  own  affair. 

In  a  word :  he  ordered  his  life  on  the  perfectly  sound  mascu 
line  instinct  for  keeping  his  work  and  his  sex  emotions  in 
separate  water-tight  compartments.  Rose  was  a  working  mem 
ber  of  his  production,  and  it  was  therefore  flagrantly  impossi 
ble  that  his  relation  with  her  should  be  other  than  purely 
professional. 

And  yet  there  had  been  something  intangibly  personal  from 
the  very  first,  about  every  one  of  their  broken  momentary 
conversations — almost  about  every  meeting  of  their  eyes.  It 
had  disturbed  him  the  first  time  he  had  ever  seen  her  smile. 
He  remembered  the  occasion  well  enough.  She  had  just 
finished  executing  the  dance  step — the  almost  inexcusably 
nilgar  little  dance  step  he  had  ordered  her  to  do  as  a  condi- 


286  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

tion  of  getting  the  job  she  said  she  wanted — had  turned  on 
him  blazing  with  indignation;  but  right  in  the  full  blaze  of 
it,  at  something  she  must  have  seen,  and  understood,  in  his 
own  face,  in  deprecation  of  her  own  wrath,  she  had,  slowly 
and  widely,  smiled. 

And  then  the  way  she  worked  for  him  in  rehearsal !  He'd 
seen  girls  work  hard  before — desperately,  frantically  hard, 
under  the  fear  that  they  weren't  good  enough  to  hold  their 
jobs.  That  wasn't  the  spirit  in  which  this  girl  worked.  She 
seemed  possessed  by  a  blazing  determination  that  the  results 
he  wanted  should  be  obtained.  It  seemed  she  couldn't  devour 
his  intentions  quickly  enough,  and  her  little  unconscious  nod 
of  satisfaction  after  he  had  corrected  a  mistake  and  she  felt 
sure  that  now  she  knew  exactly  what  he  wanted,  was  like 
nothing  in  his  previous  experience. 

The  wonderful  thing  about  it  was  that  she  carried  that 
eagerness  beyond  the  confines  of  her  own  job.  And  she  put 
it  to  good  effect  too.  She  had  taken  that  Larson  girl  and, 
by  the  plain  force  of  personal  dominance,  made  her  talk  right. 
Well,  why?  That  was  the  question.  Who  was  she  anyway? 
Where  had  she  come  from?  Who  was  "the  only  person  who 
really  mattered"  to  her — the  person  who  wasn't  a  pussy-cat? 

He  had  tried  hard  to  convince  himself  that  these  were  all 
professional  questions.  It  was  true  they  had  a  bearing  on 
the  more  important  and  perfectly  legitimate  question  whether 
he  had,  in  this  altogether  extraordinary  personality,  discovered 
a  new  star.  He  had,  during  the  last  quarter  century,  dis 
covered  a  number — one  or  two  of  them  authentically  of  the 
first  magnitude. 

It  would  have  simplified  matters  immensely  if  he  could  have 
seen  Rose  in  this  category.  But  the  stubborn  fact  was,  he 
couldn't.  She  couldn't  sing  a  bit,  and  marked  as  her  natural 
talent  was  for  dancing,  she  hadn't  begun  young  enough  ever 
to  master  the  technique  of  it.  That  left  acting;  but  he  doubted 
if  she  could  ever  go  very  far  at  that.  Salient  as  her  person 
ality  was,  she  hadn't  the  instinct  for  putting  it  over.  Or,  if 
she  had  it,  she  distrusted  it.  She  was  handicapped,  too,  by 
her  sense  of  humor.  A  real  star  in  the  egg,  wouldn't  have 


A   BUSINESS    PKOPOSITION  287 

stopped  in  the  middle  of  that  first  fine  blaze  of  wrath  he'd 
seen,  to  join  him  in  smiling  at  it.  A  real  actress  wouldn't 
have  spent  her  energies  teaching  another  woman  to  talk,  nor 
persuading  him  to  buy  another  woman  a  beautiful  frock. 
The  focus  had  to  be  sharper  than  that.  The  only  way  you  got 
the  drive  it  took  to  spell  your  name  in  electric  lights,  was  by 
subordinating  everything  else  to  the  projection  of  yourself, 
treating  your  surroundings,  with  irresistible  conviction,  merely 
as  a  background.  This  girl  could  never  do  that. 

Yet  the  notion  wouldn't  leave  his  mind  that  she  could  do 
something,  and  do  it  more  than  commonly  well.  She  must 
have  an  instinct  of  her  own  for  effects  to  enable  her  to  under 
stand  so  instantaneously  what  he  was  trying  to  do.  And  once 
in  a  while,  especially  lately,  he'd  seen,  over  some  experiment 
of  his,  a  flash  of  dissent  across  her  eager  face  which  gave 
him  the  preposterous  idea  that  by  asking  her — asking  a 
chorus-girl ! — he  might  get  a  suggestion  worth  thinking  about. 

Certainly  she  had  helped  him  in  another  way,  there  was  no 
doubt  of  that.  That  sextette,  thanks  to  her  teaching,  would 
be  the  smartest,  best  mannered  bunch  of  chorus-girls  that 
had  adorned  a  production  of  his  in  a  long,  long  time. 

And  here,  perhaps,  he  came  closer  than  anywhere  else  to 
an  understanding  of  the  source  of  the  girl's  attraction  for 
him.  John  Galbraith  could  remember  the  time  when,  a  name 
less  little  rat  of  a  cockney,  he  had  slept  under  London  bridges, 
opened  cab  doors  for  half-pence,  carried  links  on  foggy 
nights.  By  the  clear  force  of  genius  he  had  made  his  way  up 
from  that ; — from  throwing  cart-wheels  for  the  amusement  of 
the  queues  waiting  at  the  pit  entrances  of  theaters,  from  the 
ribald  knock-about  of  East  End  halls,  from  the  hilarity  of 
Drury  Lane  pantomimes.  Professionally  his  success  was  a 
solid  indubitable  thing.  If  he  weren't  actually  preeminent 
in  his  special  field,  at  least  there  was  no  one  who  was  accorded 
a  preeminence  over  him. 

But  another  ambition,  quite  apart  from  the  professional 
one,  was  hardly  so  well  satisfied.  From  the  time  of  his  very 
earliest  memories  he  had  felt  a  passionate  admiration  for  good 
breeding,  and  a  consuming  envy  of  the  lucky  unconscious  pos- 


288  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

sessors  of  it.  Since  ten  years  old,  he  had  been  possessed  by 
the  great  desire  to  be  acknowledged  a  gentleman.  There  was 
nothing  of  vulgar  veneer  about  this.  It  was  the  real  interior 
thing  he  wanted;  that  invisible  yet  perfectly  palpable  hall 
mark  which  without  explanations  or  credentials,  classified  you. 
His  profession  had  not  brought  him  in  contact  more  than  very 
infrequently  with  people  of  this  sort,  and  his  personal  inter 
ests  never  could  be  made  to  do  so  with  results  perfectly  satis 
factory  to  himself.  There  it  was, — the  thing  those  lucky 
elect  possessed  without  a  thought  or  an  effort.  It  was  an 
indestructible  possession,  apparently,  too.  You  couldn't 
throw  it  away.  Dissipation,  dishonesty,  even  a  total  collapse 
that  brought  its  victim  down  to  the  sink  that  he  himself  had 
sprouted  from,  seemed  powerless  to  efface  that  hall-mark. 

He  learned  to  suppose  that  if  it  were  indestructible,  it  was 
also  imattainable,  though  perhaps  he  himself  failed  of  attain 
ing  it  only  in  the  consciousness  of  having  failed — in  the  in 
ability  to  stop  trying  for  it,  straining  all  his  actions  through 
a  sieve  in  the  effort  to  conform  to  a  standard  not  his  own. 

"Well,  this  girl,  whose  own  life  must  have  collapsed  under 
her  in  a  peculiarly  cruel  and  dramatic  fashion  so  that  she  had 
had  to  come  to  him  and  ask  him  for  a  job  in  the  chorus — 
she  had  the  hall-mark.  She  had  besides  a  lot  of  the  qualities 
that  traditionally  went  with  it,  but  often  didn't.  She  was 
game — game  as  a  fighting-cock.  What  must  it  not  have  meant 
to  her  to  come  down  into  that  squalid  dance-hall  in  the  first 
place  and  submit  to  the  test  he  had  subjected  her  to !  How 
must  the  dressing-room  conversation  of  her  colleagues  in  the 
chorus  have  revolted  and  sickened  her?  What  must  it  mean 
to  her  to  take  his  orders — sharp  rasping  orders,  with  the 
sting  of  ridicule  in  the  tail  of  them  when  they  had  to  be  re 
peated; — to  be  addressed  by  her  last  name  like  a  servant? 
Why,  this  very  afternoon,  how  must  she  have  felt,  standing 
there  like  a  manikin,  ordered  to  put  on  this  dress  and  that, 
by  a  fussy  fat  woman  who  wouldn't  have  touched  her  with 
tongs?  But  from  not  one  of  these  experiences  had  he  ever 
seen  her  flinch  or  protest.  Oh,  yes,  she  was  game,  and  she 
was  simple,  as  they  always  were ;  a  fine  type  of  the  real  thing. 


A    BUSINESS    TEOPOSITION  289 

And,  somehow,  lie  felt,  she  treated  him  as  if  he  were  hall 
marked  too.  He  hadn't  much  to  go  by — absurdly  little  things 
really.  But,  after  all,  it  was  the  little  things  that  counted ; — 
a  fine  distinction  in  the  cadence  of  a  voice,  in  the  sort  of  nod 
of  greeting  or  farewell  one  gave.  She  never  nodded  at  him  in 
that  curt  telegraphic  sort  of  way  without  warming  him  up  a 
bit  inside. 

And  all  the  while  he  was  a  director  and  she  was  a  chorus- 
girl  and  an  unyielding  etiquette  of  their  respective  professions 
forbade  a  word  of  human  intercourse  between  them !  He  had 
violated  it,  as  both  of  them  had  been  aware,  when  he  shook 
hands  with  her  and  thanked  her  for  having  taught  Olga 
Larson  to  talk.  And  just  because  he  recognized  quite  well 
how  necessary  the  barrier  was  in  all  but  one  out  of  a  thousand 
cases,  its  existence  in  this  one  case  baffled  and  irritated  him. 

Up  to  the  hour  when  he  had  turned  into  Lessing's  store 
this  afternoon,  for  a  look  at  the  dresses  Mrs.  Goldsmith  had 
been  picking  out  for  the  sextette,  this  feeling  of  baffled 
curiosity  and  of  irritation  over  the  etiquette  that  forbade 
his  satisfying  it,  would  have  summed  up,  adequately  enough, 
all  the  emotions  he  was  conscious  of  toward  the  girl.  His 
professional  admiration  for  her  was  another  thing  of  course — 
a  perfectly  legitimate  thing.  But  with  her  appearance  from 
behind  the  screen,  in  that  French  evening  gown — a  gown  she 
wore  with  the  indescribable  air  of  belonging  in  it — with  all 
her  vibrant,  irregular,  fascinating,  eupeptic  beauty  fully 
revealed,  his-  mood  of  impatient  acquiescence  had  fallen 
away.  The  basis  of  his  feeling  toward  her  shifted  in  a  man 
ner  that  James  Eandolph  wouldn't  have  had  a  moment's 
difficulty  in  explaining,  although  Galbraith  didn't  understand 
it  himself. 

The  thing  he  was  conscious  of  was,  when  she  made  that 
offer  to  copy  this  gown  herself  for  twenty  dollars  and  so  leave 
him  leeway  for  the  purchase  of  the  Empire  frock  for  Olga — 
offering  to  go  to-  that  trouble  not  for  herself  or  her  friend, 
but  to  further  the  accomplishment  of  what  he  wanted;  namely, 
the  success  of  his  production — what  he  was  conscious  of  then, 
was  an  overpowering  desire  to  make  a  confidante  of  her;  to 


290  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

talk  matters  out  with  her,  show  her  some  of  the  major 
strategy  of  the  game  that  he  had  to  consider,  and  find  out 
how  the  thing  would  look  to  her. 

It  was  all  against  the  rules,  of  course.  But  to  this  case — • 
the  one  in  a  thousand  certainly,  in  ten  thousand  maybe — the 
rules  manifestly  did  not  apply. 

If  it  hadn't  been  for  that  opaque  white  veil,  the  glow  of 
light  and  eagerness  in  her  face  would  probably  have  con 
quered  his  resistance  finally  and  for  good,  while  they  stood 
there  in  the  entry  to  the  store.  As  it  was,  he  was  still  hanging 
on  a  dead  center  as  they  walked  down  the  east  side  of  the 
avenue  together. 

Ahead  of  them,  and  to  the  right,  over  in  Grant  Park,  was 
the  colossal  municipal  Christmas  tree,  already  built,  and  get 
ting  decorated  against  the  celebration  of  Christmas  Eve,  now 
only  two  days  away. 

"Shall  we  rehearse  on  Christmas  Day  ?"  Rose  asked. 

He  came  out  of  his  preoccupation  a  little  vaguely.  "Why, 
yes.  Yes,  of  course,"  he  said  absently.  Then,  coming  a 
little  further,  and  with  a  different  intonation,  he  went  on: 
"We're  really  getting  pressed  for  time,  you  see.  And  the 
opening  won't  wait  for  anybody.  It's  hard  luck  though,  isn't 
it?" 

"I  suppose  it  is,  for  the  others,"  Rose  said,  "but — I'm 
glad." 

It  wouldn't  have  needed  so  sensitive  an  ear  as  his  to  catch 
the  girl's  full  meaning.  Christmas — this  Christmas,  the  first 
since  that  mysterious  collapse  of  her  life,  whose  effect  he  had 
seen,  but  whose  cause  he  couldn't  guess — was  going  to  be  a 
terrible  day  for  her.  She  had  dreaded  lest  it  should  be  empty. 
He  wanted  to  say,  "You  poor  child !"  But — this  was  the 
simple  fact — he  was  afraid  to. 

There  was  another  momentary  silence,  and  again  Rose 
broke  it. 

"Do  you  think  you'll  be  able  to  convince  Mrs.  Goldsmith," 
she  asked,  "that  her  gowns  don't  look  well  on  the  stage  ?" 

"Probably  not,"  he  said  in  quick  relief.  Rose  had  decided 
the  issue  for  herself;  brought  up  the  very  topic  he'd  wanted 


291 

to  bring  up;  got  him  off  his  dead  center  at  last.  Back  of 
Rose,  of  course,  was  the  municipal  Christmas  tree  with  its 
power  of  suggesting  a  lot  of  ideas  she  must  fight  out  of  her 
mind. 

"Certainly  not/'  he  went  on,  "if  you're  right  about  her, 
and  I  fancy  you  are,  that  her  taste  isn't  negative,  but  bad, 
and  that  it's  the  very  hideousness  of  the  things  she  likes.  No, 
she  won't  be  convinced,  and  if  I  know  Goldsmith,  he'll  say 
his  wife's  taste  is  good  enough  for  him.  So  if  we  want  a 
change,  we've  a  fight  on  our  hands." 

The  way  he  had  unconsciously  phrased  that  sentence  startled 
him  a  little. 

"The  question  is,"  he  went  on,  "whether  they're  worth  mak 
ing  a  fight  about.  Are  they  so  bad  as  I  think  they  are  ?" 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Rose.  "They're  dowdy  and  fourth-class 
and  ridiculous.  Of  course  I  don't  know  how  many  people 
in  the  audience  would  know  that." 

"And  I  don't  care,"  said  John  Galbraith  with  a  flash  of 
intensity  that  made  her  look  round  at  him.  "That's  not  a 
consideration  I'll  give  any  weight  to.  When  I  put  out  a 
production  under  my  name,  it  means  it's  the  best  production 
I  can  make  with  the  means  I've  got.  There  may  be  men 
who  can  work  differently;  but  when  I  have  to  take  a  cynical 
view  of  it  and  try  to  get  by  with  bad  work  because  most  of  the 
people  out  in  front  won't  know  the  difference,  I'll  retire.  I'm 
only  fifty  and  I've  got  ten  or  fifteen  good  years  in  me  yet. 
But  before  I'll  do  that,  I'll  go  out  to  my  little  farm  on  Long 
Island  and  raise  garden  truck." 

There  was  another  momentary  silence,  for  the  girl  made 
no  comment  at  all  on  this  statement  of  his  credo.  But  he  felt 
sure,  somehow,  that  she  understood  it  and  there  was  nothing 
deprecatory  about  the  tone  in  which,  presently,  he  went  on 
speaking. 

"Of  course  a  director's  got  only  one  weapon  to  use  against 
the  owners  of  a  show,  when  it  comes  down  to  an  issue,  and 
that's  a  threat  to  resign  unless  they  let  him  have  his  way. 
I've  used  that  twice  in  this  production  already,  and  I  can  see 
one  or  two  places  coming  where  I  may  have  to  use  it  again. 


292  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

So,  if  there's  any  way  of  throwing  out  those  costumes  without 
giving  them  their  choice  between  getting  new  ones  or  getting 
a  new  director,  I'd  like  to  find  it.  Would  it  be  possible,  do 
you  think,  to  get  better  ones  that  would  also  be  cheaper? 
That  argument  would  bring  Goldsmith  around  in  a  hurry. 
It's  ridiculous,  of  course,  but  that's  the  trouble  with  making 
a  production  for  amateurs.  You  spend  more  time  fighting 
them,  than  you  do  producing  the  show." 

"I  don't  believe,"  said  Rose,  "that  you  could  get  better 
ready-made  costumes  a  lot  cheaper;  at  least,  not  enough  to 
go  around,  and  in  a  hurry.  Of  course  every  now  and  then, 
you  can  pick  up  a  tremendous  bargain — some  imported  model 
that's  a  little  extreme,  or  made  in  trying  colors,  that  they  want 
to  get  rid  of  and  will  sell  almost  for  whatever  you'll  pay.  But 
the  two  or  three  we  might  be  able  to  find,  wouldn't  help  us 
much." 

"And  I  suppose/'  he  said  dubiously,  "it's  out  of  the  ques 
tion  getting  them  any  other  way  than  ready-made;  that  is, 
and  cheaper  too." 

The  only  sign  of  excitement  there  was  in  the  girl's  voice 
when  she  answered,  was  a  sort  of  exaggerated  matter-of-fact- 
ness.  Oh,  yes,  there  was  besides  a  wire  edge  on  it,  so  that 
the  words  came  to  him  through  the  cold  air  with  a  kind  of 
ringing  distinctness. 

"I  could  design  the  costumes  and  pick  out  the  materials," 
she  said,  "but  we'd  have  to  get  a  good  sewing  woman — perhaps 
more  than  one,  to  get  them  done." 

He  wasn't  greatly  surprised.  Perhaps  the  notion  that  she 
might  suggest  something  of  the  sort  was  responsible  for  the 
tentative  dubious  way  in  which  he  had  said  he  supposed  it 
couldn't  be  done. 

But  Rose,  at  the  sound  of  her  own  voice  and  the  extraordi 
nary  proposition  it  was  uttering,  was  astonished  clear  through. 
She  hadn't  had  the  remotest  idea  of  saying  such  a  thing  a 
moment  or  two  before.  What  had  suggested  it,  she  couldn't 
have  told.  That  day-dream  perhaps,  that  she  had  amused 
herself  with  while  Mrs.  Goldsmith  was  making  up  the  tale  of 
her  atrocities.  Perhaps  it  had  been  just  the  suggestion, 


A    BUSINESS    PROPOSITION  293 

speaking  in  the  tone,  not  the  word?,  of  John  Galbraith's 
voice — that  he  hoped  she'd  offer  something  like  that. 

Anyway,  whatever  it  was  that  presented  the  idea  to  her, 
the  thing  that  seized  on  it  and  spoke  it  aloud  was  an  instinct 
that  didn't  need  to  stop  and  think — an  instinct  that  realized 
indeed,  if  this  isn't  too  far-fetched  a  way  of  putting  it,  that 
its  only  chance  lay  in  escaping  into  the  open  ahead  of  the 
slower-footed  processes  of  thought.  If  she  hadn't  spoken  in 
stantly  like  that,  it's  perfectly  clear  she  wouldn't  have  spoken 
at  all.  But,  having  heard  her  own  voice  say  the  words,  she 
resolved,  in  spite  of  her  fright — because  she  was  frightened 
— to  back  them  up. 

"You've  had — experience  in  designing  gowns,  have  you?" 
Galbraith  asked. 

"Only  for  myself,"  she  admitted.  "But  I  know  I  can  do 
that  part  of  it." 

And  she  wasn't  telling  more  than  the  truth  !  The  confident 
excitement  that  possessed  her,  gave  a  stronger  assurance  than 
any  amount  of  experience  could  have  done. 

"But," — she  reverted  to  the  other  part  of  the  plan — "I'm 
not  a  good  sewer.  I'd  have  to  have  somebody  awfully  good, 
who'd  do  exactly  what  I  told  her." 

"Oh,  that  can  be  managed,"  he  said  a  little  absently,  and 
with  what  struck  Rose  as  a  mere  man's  ignorance  of  the 
difficulties  of  the  situation.  Expert  sewing  women  didn't 
grow  on  every  bush.  But  at  the  end  of  a  silence  that  lasted 
while  they  walked  a  whole  block,  he  convinced  her  that  she 
had  been  mistaken. 

"I  was  just  figuring  out  the  way  to  work  it,"  he  said  then, 
explaining  his  silence.  "I  shall  tell  Goldsmith  and  Block 
(Block  was  the  junior  partner  in  the  enterprise)  that  I've 
got  hold  of  a  costumer  who  agrees  to  deliver  twelve  costumes 
satisfactory  to  me,  at  an  average  of  say,  twenty  per  cent,  less 
than  the  ones  Mrs.  Goldsmith  picked  out.  If  they  aren't 
satisfactory,  it's  the  costumer's  loss  and  we  can  buy  these 
that  Mrs.  Goldsmith  picked  out,  or  others  that  will  do  as 
well,  at  Lessing's.  I  think  that  saving  will  be  decisive  with 
them." 


294  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"But  do  you  know  a  costuiner  ?"  Eose  asked. 

"You're  the  costumer,"  said  Galbraith.  "You  design  the 
costumes,  buy  the  fabrics,  superintend  the  making  of  them. 
As  for  the  woman  you  speak  of,  we'll  get  the  wardrobe  mis 
tress  at  the  Globe.  I  happen  to  know  she's  competent,  and 
she's  at  a  loose  end  just  now,  because  her  show  is  closing  when 
ours  opens.  You'll  buy  the  fabrics  and  you'll  pay  her.  And 
what  profit  you  can  make  out  of  the  deal,  you're  entitled  to. 
I'll  finance  you  myself.  If  they  won't  take  what  we  show 
them,  why,  you'll  be  out  your  time  and  trouble,  and  I'll  be 
out  the  price  of  materials  and.  the  woman's  labor." 

"I  don't  think  it  would  be  fair,"  she  said,  and  she  found 
difficulty  in  speaking  at  all  because  of  a,  sudden  disposition 
of  her  teeth  to  chatter — "I  don't  think  it  would  be  fair  for 
me  to  take  all  the  profit  and  you  take  all  the  risk." 

"Well,  I  can't  take  any  profit,  that's  clear  enough,"  he 
said ;  and  she  noticed  now  a  tinge  of  amusement  in  his  voice. 
"You  see,  I'm  retained,  body  and  soul,  to  put  this  production 
over.  I  can't  make  money  out  of  those  fellows  on  the  side. 
But  you're  not  retained.  You're  employed  as  a  member  of 
the  chorus.  And  so  far,  you're  not  even,  being  paid  for  the 
work  you're  doing.  As  long  as  you  work  to  my  satisfaction 
there  on  the  stage,  nothing  more  can  be  asked  of  you.  As  for 
the  risk,  I  don't  believe  it's  serious.  I  don't  think  you'll  fall 
down  on  the  job,  and  I  don't  believe  Goldsmith  and  Block 
will  throw  away  a  chance  to  save  some  money." 

At  the  end  of  another  silence,  for  Eose  was  speechless  here, 
he  went  on  expanding  the  plan  a  little  further.  And  if  the 
assurances  he  gave  her  were  essentially  mendacious,  he  himself 
wasn't  exactly  aware  that  they  were.  It  had  often  happened 
in  productions  of  his,  he  said — and  this  much  was  true — 
that  to  save  time  or  to  accomplish  some  result  he  wanted,  he 
put  up  a  little  of  his  own  money  for  something  and  trusted 
to  a  prosperous  event  for  getting  it  back.  It  was  clearly  for 
the  good  of  the  show  that  the  costumes  for  the  sextette  should 
be  better  than  the  ones  Mrs.  Goldsmith  had  picked  out.  The 
only  alternative  way  of  getting  them,  to  a  knock-down  and 
carry-away  fight  with  Goldsmith  and  Block,  which,  even  if  it 


A    BUSINESS    PROPOSITION  295 

were  successful,  would  weaken  the  effect  of  his  next  ultima 
tum,  was  the  plan  he  now  proposed  to  Rose.  She  needn't 
regard  the  money  he  put  up  as  in  any  sense  a  personal  loan 
to  her.  They  were  simply  cooperating  for  the  good  of  the 
enterprise.  If  her  work  turned  out  to  be  valuable,  it  was  only 
right  she  should  be  paid  for  it. 

And  then  he  pressed  her  for  an  immediate  decision.  The 
job  would  be  a  good  deal  of  a  scramble  at  best,  as  the  time 
was  short.  If  she  agreed  to  it,  he'd  get  in  touch  with  the 
wardrobe  mistress  at  the  Globe,  to-night.  As  for  the  money, 
he  had  a  hundred  dollars  or  so  in  his  pocket,  which  she  could 
take  to  start  out  with. 

Of  course  the  only  lie  involved  in  all  this  was  the  warp 
of  the  whole  fabric;  that  he  was  doing  it,  impersonally,  for 
the  success  of  the  show.  And  that  might  well  enough  have 
been  true.  Only  in  this  case,  it  definitely  wasn't.  He  was 
doing  it  because  it  would  establish  a  personal  connection,  the 
want  of  which  was  becoming  so  tormenting  a  thing  to  his 
soul,  between  himself  and  this  girl  whom  he  had  to  order 
about  on  the  stage  and  call  by  her  last  name,  or  rather  by 
a  last  name  that  wasn't  hers — an  imagination-stirring,  ques 
tion-compelling,  warm,  human  creature,  who,  up  to  now,  had 
been  as  completely  shut  away  from  him  as  if  she  had  been 
a  wax  figure  in  a  show-window. 

They  had  reached  the  Randolph  Street  end  of  the  avenue, 
and  a  policeman,  like  Moses  cleaving  the  Red  Sea,  had  opened 
the  way  through  the  tide  of  motors  for  a  throng  of  pedes 
trians  bound  across  the  viaduct  to  the  Illinois  Central  subur 
ban  station. 

"Come  across  here,"  said  Galbraith  taking  her  by  the  arm 
and  stemming  this  current  with  her.  "We've  got  to  have  a 
minute  of  shelter  to  finish  this  up  in,"  and  he  led  her  into 
the  north  lobby  of  the  public  library.  The  stale  baked  air 
of  the  place  almost  made  them  gasp.  But,  anyway,  it  was 
quiet  and  altogether  deserted.  They  could  hear  themselves 
think  in  here,  he  said,  and  led  the  way  to  a  marble  bench 
alongside  the  staircase. 

Hose  unpinned  her  veil  and,  to  his  surprise,  because  of 


296  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

course  she  was  going  out  in  a  minute,  put  it  into  her  ulster 
pocket.  But,  curiously  enough,  the  sight  of  her  face  only 
intensified  an  impression  that  had  been  strong  on  him  during 
the  last  part  of  their  walk — the  impression  that  she  was  a  long 
way  off.  It  wasn't  the  familiar  contemplative  brown  study, 
either.  There  was  an  active  eager  excitement  about  it  that 
made  it  more  beautiful  than  ever  he  had  seen  it  before.  But 
it  was  as  if  she  were  looking  at  something  he  couldn't  see — 
listening  to  words  he  couldn't  hear. 

""Well,"  he  said  a  little  impatiently,  "are  you  going  to 
do  it?" 

At  that  the  glow  of  her  was  turned  fairly  on  him.  "Yes," 
she  said,  "I'm  going  to  do  it.  I  suppose  I  mustn't  thank 
you,"  she  went  on,  "because  you  say  it  isn't  anything  you're 
doing  for  me.  But  it  is — a  great  thing  for  me — greater 
than  I  could  tell  you.  And  I  won't  fail.  You  needn't  be 
afraid." 

Inexplicably  to  him  (the  problem  wouldn't  have  troubled 
James  Randolph)  the  very  completeness  with  which  she  made 
this  acknowledgment — the  very  warmth  of  the  hand-clasp 
with  which  she  bound  the  bargain,  vaguely  disappointed  him 
— left  him  feeling  a  little  flat  and  empty  over  his  victory. 

He  found  his  pocketbook  and  counted  out  a  hundred  and 
twenty  dollars,  which  he  handed  over  to  her.  She  folded  it 
and  put  it  away  in  her  wrist-bag.  The  glow  of  her  hadn't 
faded,  but  once  more  it  was  turned  on  something — or  some 
one — else.  It  wasn't  until  he  rose  a  little  abruptly  from  the 
marble  bench,  that  she  roused  herself  with  a  shake  of  the 
head,  arose  too,  and  once  more  faced  him. 

"You're  right  about  our  having  to  hurry,"  she  said.  "Don't 
you  suppose  that  some  of  the  department  stores  on  the  west 
side  of  State  Street  would  still  be  open — on  account  of 
Christmas,  you  know  ?" 

"I  don't  know,"  he  said.  "Very  likely.  But  look  here !" 
He  pulled  out  his  watch.  "It's  after  seven  already.  And  re 
hearsal's  at  eight-thirty.  You've  got  to  get  some  dinner,  you 
know." 

"Dinner  doesn't  take  long  at  the  place  where  I  go,"  she 


A    BUSINESS    PROPOSITION  297 

reminded  him.  "But  if  I  can  get  one  or  two  things  now — I 
don't  mean  the  materials — why,  I  can  get  a  start  to-night 
after  the  rehearsal's  over." 

"I  don't  like  it/'  he  said  glumly.  "Oh,  I  know,  it's  a  rush 
job  and  you'll  have  to  work  at  it  at  all  sorts  of  hours.  If 
only  you  ...  If  I  could  just  ease  up  a  bit  on  your  re 
hearsals  !  Only,  you  see,  the  sextette  would  be  lost  without 
you.  Look  here !  There's  nothing  life  or  death  about  this, 
you  know.  You  don't  want  to  forget  that  you've  got  a  limit, 
and  crowd  the  late-at-night  and  early-in-the-morning  busi 
ness  too  hard.  Think  where  we'd  be  if  you  turned  up  missing 
on  the  opening  night !" 

"I  shan't  do  that,"  she  said  absently  almost,  and  not  in 
his  direction.  Then,  with  another  little  shake,  bringing  her 
self  back  to  him  with  a  visible  effort :  "If  you  only  knew  what 
a  wonderful  thing  it's  going  to  be,  to  have  something  for  late 
at  night  and  early  in  the  morning  .  .  .  " 

Before  he  could  find  the  first  one  of  the  words  he  wanted, 
she  had  given  him  that  curt  farewell  nod  which,  so  inex 
plicably,  from  the  first  had  stirred  and  warmed  him,  and 
turned  away  toward  the  door. 

And  she  had  never  seen  what  was  fairly  shining  in  his 
face;  no  more  than  she  had  heard  the  thing  that  rang  so 
eagerly  in  his  voice  through  the  thin  disguise  of  an  imper 
sonal,  director-like  concern  that  she  shouldn't  impair  her 
health  so  far  as  to  spoil  her  for  the  sextette ! 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   END   OF   A   FIXED   IDEA 

SHE  couldn't  of  course  have  missed  a  thing  as  plain  as  that 
but  for  a  complete  preoccupation  of  thought  and  feeling  that 
would  have  left  her  oblivious  to  almost  anything  that  could 
happen  to  her.  Galbraith  himself  had  detected  this  preoc 
cupation,  but  he  would  have  been  staggered  had  'he  known  its 
intensity.  He  had  likened  it  in  his  own  thoughts,  to  an 
effect  that  might  have  been  caused  by  the  presence  with  her  of 
another  person  whom  he  could  neither  see  nor  hear.  And  that, 
had  he  believed  it  seriously,  would  have  been  an  almost  un 
cannily  correct  guess. 

The  flaming  vortex  of  thoughts,  hopes,  desires  which  en 
veloped  her,  was  so  intense  as  almost  to  evoke  a  sense  of  the 
physical  presence  of  the  subject  of  them- — of  that  big,  power 
ful-minded,  clean-souled  husband  of  hers,  who  loved  her  so 
rapturously,  and  who  had  driven  her  away  from  him  because 
that  rapture  was  the  only  thing  he  would  share  with  her. 

She  had  been  living,  since  that  day  of  his  departure  for 
New  York,  when  she  had  felt  the  last  of  his  strong  embraces, 
a  life  that  fell  into  two  hemispheres  as  distinct  from  each 
other  as  tropic  night  from  day.  One  half  of  it  had  been 
lighted  and  made  tolerable  by  the  exactions  of  her  new  job. 
"What  you  feel  like  doing  isn't  important,  and  what  I  tell 
you  to  do  is,"  John  Galbraith  had  said  to  her  on  the  day  this 
strange  divided  life  of-hers  had  begun.  And  this  lesson,  taken 
to  heart,  had  spelt  salvation  to  her — for  half  of  the  time ;  for 
as  many  hours  of  the  day  as  he  went  on  telling  her  to  do 
something.  Those  hours,  in  a  way  almost  incredible  to  her 
self  when  they  were  over,  had  been  almost  happy — would  have 
been  altogether  happy,  but  for  the  stain  that  soaked  through 

298 


THE    EXD    OF    A    FIXED    IDEA  299 

in  memory  and  in  anticipation,  from  the  other  half  of  her 
days. 

But  when  evening  rehearsal  was  over  and  she  came  back 
to  her  room  and  had  to  undress  and  put  out  her  light  and  re 
lax  her  mind  for  sleep,  letting  the  terrors  that  came  to  tear 
at  her  do  their  unopposed  worst,  then  the  girl  who  sang  and 
danced  and  was  so  nearly  happy  snatching  John  Galbraith's 
intentions  half  formed,  and  executing  them  in  the  thrill  of 
satisfaction  over  work  well  done,  became  an  utterly  unreal, 
incredible  person — the  mere  figment  of  a  dream  that  couldn't 
— couldn't  possibly  recur  again  even  as  a  dream;  the  only 
self  in  her  that  had  any  actual  existence  was  Rodney  Aldrich's 
wife  and  the  mother  of  his  children,  lying  here  in  a  mean  bed, 
or  looking  with  feverish  eyes  out  of  the  window  in  a  North 
Clark  Street  rooming  house,  in  a  torment  of  thwarted  desire 
for  him  that  was  by  no  means  wholly  mental  or  psychical. 

And  what  was  he  doing  now  in  her  absence?  Was  he  in 
torment,  too;  shaken  by  gusts  of  uncontrollable  longing  for 
her;  fighting  off  nightmare  imaginings  of  disasters  that  might 
be  befalling  her?  Or  was  he  happy,  drinking  down  in  great 
thirsty  drafts  the  nectar  of  liberty  which  her  incursion 
into  his  life  had  deprived  him  of  ?  She  didn't  know  which  of 
these  alternatives  was  the  more  intolerable  to  her. 

And  the  twins!  Were  they,  the  fine  lusty  little  cherubs 
she  had  parted  from  that  day,  smiling  up  with  growing 
recognition  into  other  faces — Mrs.  Euston's  and  the  maid 
Doris'  ?  Or  might  there  have  been,  since  the  last  information 
relayed  by  Portia,  a  sudden  illness?  Might  it  be  that  there 
was  going  on  now,  in  that  house  not  a  thousand  yards  away, 
another  life-and-death  struggle  like  the  one  which  had  made 
an  end  of  all  her  hopes  for  the  efficacy  of  her  miracle  ? 

The  only  treatment  for  hobgoblins  like  that  was  plain  en 
durance.  This  was  a  part  of  a  somber  sobering  discovery 
that  Rose  had  made  during  the  first  few  days  of  her  new 
life.  Courage  of  the  active  sort  she'd  always  had.  The  way 
she  went  up  to  Forth  End  Hall  and  wrested  a  job  that 
didn't  strictly  exist,  from  John  Galbraith,  was  an  example 
of  it.  When  it  was  a  question  of  blazing  up  and  doing  some- 


300 

thing,  she  had  rightly  counted  on  herself  not  to  fail.  This 
was  what  she'd  foreseen  when  she  promised  Portia  that  she 
would  fight  for  the  big  thing. 

But  that  part  of  the  battle  of  life  had  to  consist  just  in 
doing  nothing,  enduring  with  a  stiff  mouth  and  clenched 
hands  assaults  that  couldn't  be  replied  to,  was  a  fact  she  hadn't 
foreseen.  What  a  child  she  had  always  been!  Eodney,  Por 
tia,  everybody  who  amounted  to  anything,  must  have  learned 
that  lesson  of  sheer  endurance  long  ago. 

The  queerly  incredible  quality  of  the  lighted  half  of  her  life 
— the  half  that  John  Galbraith's  will  galvanized  into  motion — 
prevented  any  afterglow  from  illuminating  and  making  toler 
able  the  dark  half.  No  achievement  of  her  days — not  even 
teaching  the  sextette  to  talk — had  the  power  to  give  her,  in 
her  nights,  a  sense  of  progress,  or  to  lessen  the  necessity  for 
that  sheer  dumb  endurance  which  was  the  only  weapon  she 
had.  Because  she  was  in  the  fetters  of  a  fixed  idea. 

Of  course  it  was  only  by  virtue  of  the  possession  of  a  fixed 
idea — a  purpose  as  rigid  in  its  outlines  as  the  steel  frame  of 
a  sky-scraper — that  she  had  been  able  to  force  herself  to  leave 
Rodney  and  set  out  in  pursuit  of  a  job  that  would  make  a 
life  of  her  own  a  possible  thing.  You  are  already  acquainted 
with  the  outlines  of  that  purpose.  She  lacked  the  special 
training  which  alone  could  make  any  sort  of  self-respecting 
life  possible.  The  only  thing  she  had  to  capitalize  when  she 
left  her  husband's  house,  was  the  thing  which  had  got  her  into 
it — her  sex  charm.  The  only  excuse  for  capitalizing  that 
again  was  that  it  would  make  it  possible  for  her  to  acquire 
a  special  training  in  some  other  field.  Stenography,  she  had 
thought  vaguely,  would  be  the  first  round  of  the  ladder. 
Until  this  production  opened  and  she  began  drawing  a  salary, 
she  couldn't  really  begin  doing  the  thing  she  had  set  out  to  do. 

Consequently,  anything  that  seemed  like  progress  during 
her  day's  work  for  Galbraith — any  glow  of  triumph  she  came 
away  with  after  meeting  and  conquering  some  difficulty — 
must  be  pure  illusion. 

It  was  all  perfectly  logical  and  it  was  all  perfectly  false. 
She  had  been  growing  really,  in  strides,  from  day  to  day, 


THE   END    OF   A   FIXED   IDEA  301 

since  that  first  day  of  all  when,  after  hearing  the  director 
tell  another  woman  that  there  were  no  vacancies  in  the  chorus, 
she  had  forced  herself  to  go  up  and  ask  him  for  a  job.  She 
had  been  disciplining  herself  under  Rodney's  own  definition 
of  the  term.  Discipline,  he  had  said,  was  standing  the  gaff — 
standing  it,  not  submitting  to  it;  accepting  the  facts  of  your 
own  life  as  they  happened  to  be!  Not  making  masters  of 
them,  but  servants  to  the  underlying  thing  you  wanted. 

And  if  only  she  could  have  believed  her  own  vision,  the 
outlines  of  the  underlying  thing  she  wanted  were  beginning 
to  appear,  as  in  a  half  developed  negative.  It  hadn't  been 
from  a  cold  sense  of  duty,  or  from  a  cold  fear  of  losing  her 
job,  that  she  had  thrown  herself  into  the  accomplishment  of 
John  Galbraith's  wishes,  or  had  felt  that  almost  fierce  desire 
that  some  effect  he  was  trying  for  and  that  she  understood, 
should  get  an  objective  validity.  It  hadn't  been  out  of  pure 
altruism  that  she'd  spent  those  twelve  solid  hours  compelling 
Olga  Larson  to  talk  better.  She  might  have  felt  sorry  for 
the  girl — might  have  loaned  her  money,  comforted  her;  but 
she  wouldn't  have  locked  her  in  her  room  and  beaten  down 
her  sullen  opposition,  set  her  afire  with  her  own  vitality,  ex 
cept  that  it  was  a  thing  that  had  to  be  done  for  the  good  of 
the  show. 

In  short,  she  was,  to  fall  back  on  Rodney's  phrase  again, 
for  the  first  time  driving  herself  with  the  motive  power  of 
her  own  desires — riding  the  back  of  a  hitherto  unsuspected 
passion.  But  the  binding  force  of  that  fixed  idea  of  hers  had 
been  sufficient  all  along  to  keep  up  the  delusion  of  unreality 
about  the  real  half  of  her  life  and  to  make  the  nightmare 
half  of  it  seem  true. 

It  wasn't'  until  she  heard  herself  telling  John  Galbraith 
that  she  could  design  those  costumes  for  him,  and  in  a  flame 
of  suddenly  kindled  excitement,  resolved  to  make  that  unex 
pected  promise  good,  that  the  fetters  of  her  false  logic  fell 
away  from  her. 

The  truth  of  the  matter,  the  wonderful,  almost  incredible 
truth,  kept  coming  up  brighter  and  clearer  as  she  walked 
silently  along  beside  him  down  the  avenue.  The  real  be- 


303  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

ginning  of  the  pilgrimage  that  was  to  carry  her  back  into  her 
husband's  life,  wasn't  a  thing  that  had  to  be  waited  for.  It 
could  begin  now!  No,  the  truth  was  better  than  that;  it 
had  begun  already!  Because  if  John  Galbraith  had  come 
to  her  house  a  month  ago,  when  she  was  casting  about  so 
desperately  for  a  way  of  earning  a  living,  and  had  offered  her 
the  chance  just  as  he  had  offered  it  to-night,  she'd  have  de 
clined  it.  She  wouldn't  have  known  what  he  wanted.  She'd 
rightly  have  said  that  the  thing  was  utterly  beyond  her  powers. 
To-night  she  knew  what  he  wanted  and  she  was  utterly  con 
fident  of  her  ability  to  give  it  to  him. 

And  the  one  word  that  blaze  of  confidence  spelled  for  her 
in  letters  of  fire,  was  her  husband's  name.  This  chance  that 
had  been  offered  her  was  a  ladder  that  would  enable  her  to 
climb  part  of  the  way  back  to  him.  Her  accomplishment  of 
this  first  breathlessly  exciting  task  would  be  a  thing,  when  it 
was  achieved,  that  she  could  recount  to  him — well,  as  man  to 
man.  Her  success,  if  she  succeeded — and  the  alternative  was 
something  she  wouldn't  contemplate — would  compel  the  same 
sort  of  respect  from  him  that  he  accorded  to  a  diagnosis  of 
James  Randolph's,  or  an  article  of  Barry  Lake's. 

Since  she  had  left  his  house  and  begun  this  new  life  of  hers, 
phe  had,  as  best  she  could,  been  fighting  him  out  of  her 
thoughts  altogether.  She  had  shrunk  from  anything  that 
carried  associations  of  him  with  it.  Outside  the  hours  of 
rehearsal  (and  how  grateful  she  always  was  when  they  pro 
tracted  themselves  unduly)  she  had  walked  timidty,  like  a 
child  down  a  dim  hallway  with  black  yawning  doorways  open 
ing  out  of  it,  in  a  dread  which  sometimes  reached  the  in 
tensity  of  terror,  lest  reminders  of  the  man  she  loved  should 
spring  out  upon  her.  That  all  thoughts  and  memories  of  him 
must  necessarily  be  painful,  she  had  taken  for  granted. 

But  with  this  sudden  lighting  up  of  hope,  which  took  place 
within  her  when  she  made  John  Galbraith  that  astonishing 
offer  and  he  accepted  it,  she  flung  the  closed  door  wide  and 
called  her  husband  back  into  her  thoughts — greeted  the  image 
of  him  passionately,  in  an  almost  palpable  embrace.  This 


THE    END    OF    A   FIXED    IDEA  303 

hard  thing  that  she  was  going  to  do,  which  had,  to  common- 
sense  calculation,  so  many  chances  of  disaster  in  it — this 
thing  that  meant  sleepless  nights,  and  feverishly  active  days, 
was  an  expression  simply  of  her  love  for  him ;  a  sacrificial 
offering  to  be  laid  before  the  shrine  of  him  in  her  heart. 

Well,  it  was  no  wonder  then  that  to  John  Galbraith  she 
had  seemed  preoccupied  and  far  away,  nor  that  amid  the 
surging  thoughts  and  memories  of  her  lover,  coming  in  like 
a  returning  tide,  she  should  have  been  deaf  to  a  meaning  in 
the  director's  tones  that  any  one  of  the  stupid  little  flutterers 
in  the  chorus  would  instantly  have  understood. 

A  man  with  a  volcanic  incandescence  within  him  such  as 
was  now  afire  in  Hose,  is  utterly  useless  until  it  subsides — 
totally  incapable,  at  least,  of  any  sort  of  creative  or  imagina 
tive  work.  Until  the  fire  can  be,  by  one  means  or  another  and 
for  the  time  being,  put  out,  he  has  no  energies  worth  mention 
ing,  to  devote  to  anything  else.  And,  just  as  no  woman  can 
understand  the  cold  austerities  of  the  cell  into  which  a  man 
must  retire  in  order  to  give  his  finer  faculties  free  play,  so 
no  man  can  possibly  understand,  although  objective  evidence 
may  compel  him  to  admit  and  chronicle  it  as  a  fact,  that  a 
woman  borne  along  as  Rose  was,  upon  an  irresistible  tide  of 
passions,  memories  and  hopes,  which  all  but  made  her  absent 
husband  actually  visible  to  her,  could  at  the  same  time,  be  see 
ing  visions  of  her  accomplished  work  and  laying  plans — 
limpid  practicable  plans,  for  their  realization. 

This  is,  perhaps,  one  of  the  few,  and  certainly  one  of  the 
most  fundamental  chasms  of  cleavage  between  the  two  sexes; 
a  chasm  bridged  by  habit  invariably,  because  some  sort  of 
thoroughfare  has  to  exist,  bridged,  too,  more  rarely,  by  in 
tellectual  understanding.  But  never  bridged,  I  think,  be 
tween  two  persons  strongly  masculine  and  feminine  respect 
ively,  by  an  instinctive  sympathy.  To  each,  the  other's  way 
of  life  must  always  be  mysterious,  and  at  times  exasperating 
or  a  little  contemptible. 

To  the  woman,  with  the  finely  constant  impenetration  of 
love  through  all  her  spiritual  life,  the  man's  uncontrollable 


304  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

blaze  and  his  alternate  coldness,  seem  fitful — weak — brutish, 
almost  unworthy  of  a  creature  with  a  soul. 

To  the  man  who  knows  the  value  of  his  phases  of  high 
austerity  and  understands  quite  well  the  price  at  which  he 
obtains  them,  the  woman  who  fails  to  understand  the  neces 
sity  or  to  appreciate  the  mood  seems  sentimental  and  a  little 
unworthy. 

Well,  the  fact  that  Rose's  heart  was  racing  and  her  nerves 
were  tingling  with  a  newly  welcomed  sense  of  her  lover's 
spiritual  presence,  did  not  prevent  her  flying  along  west  on 
Randolph  Street  and  south  again  on  the  west  side  of  State, 
with  a  very  clearly  visualized  purpose.  She  had  forgotten  to 
replace  her  veil,  but  at  that  hour  it  didn't  matter.  The  west 
side  of  State  Street,  anyway,  is  almost  as  far  from  the  east 
as  North  Clark  Street  is  from  the  Drive. 

As  she  came  abreast  of  the  first  of  the  big  department 
stores  which  line  the  west  side  of  this  thoroughfare,  she  saw 
that  her  surmise  had  been  correct.  It  was  open.  Throngs  of 
weary  shoppers  were  crowding  out,  and  a  very  respectable 
stream  of  them  were  forcing  their  way  in.  She  told  an  ex 
hausted  floor-walker  that  she  wanted  to  buy  a  dressmaking 
form.  And,  spent  as  he  was,  he  reflected  a  little  of  her  own 
animation  in  his  unusually  precise  reply ;  had,  indeed,  a  little 
of  it  left  over  for  his  next  inquirer. 

Something  automatic  in  her  mind  took  charge  of  Rose  and 
delivered  her,  presently,  unconscious  of  intervening  proc 
esses,  at  the  counter  where  the  forms  were  sold.  She  selected 
what  she  wanted  instantly,  and  counted  out  the  money  from 
her  own  purse.  She  didn't  have  to  dip  into  John  Galbraith's 
hundred  and  twenty  dollars  for  this. 

"Address  ?"  inquired  the  saleswoman  preparing  to  make  out 
her  sales-slip.  Then,  as  Rose  didn't  answer  instantly,  she 
looked  up  frowning  into  her  face.  "You  want  it  sent,  don't 
you?"  she  added. 

The  question  was  rhetorical,  because  with  its  standard,  the 
thing  stood  five  feet  high  and  weighed  twenty-five  pounds. 

A  frown  of  perplexity  in  Rose's  face  gave  way  to  her  own 
wide  smile.  "I  guess  I'll  have  to  take  it  with  me,"  she  said. 


THE    END    OF    A   FIXED    IDEA  305 

Because  as  near  Christmas  as  this,  the  thing  mightn't  be  de 
livered  for  two  days. 

"Take  it  with  you !"  the  woman  echoed,  aghast. 

"Have  it  wrapped  up,"  said  Rose  decisively,  "and  put  my 
name  on  it — Mrs.  .  .  ."  She  checked  herself  with  an 
other  smile.  She  had  nearly  said,  "Mrs.  Rodney  Aldrich." 
But  the  mistake  didn't  hurt  as  it  would  have  hurt  yesterday. 
"Doris  Dane,"  she  went  on.  "And  have  it  sent  down  to  the 
main  entrance.  I'll  be  there  as  soon  as  it  is.  Do  you  know 
where  I  can  buy  paper  cambric?"  But  she  had  to  get  that 
information  from  another  floor-walker. 

Paper  cambric  seemed  to  have  more  of  a  bearing  upon  the 
approach  of  Christmas  Day  than  dressmaking  forms,  though 
just  what  the  connection  was,  Rose  couldn't  make  out.  There 
was  a  crowd  at  the  counter,  anyhow.  It  was  five  minutes  be 
fore  she  could  get  waited  on.  But  once  she  caught  a  sales 
woman's  eye,  her  purchase  was  quickly  made.  She  bought 
three  bolts :  one  of  black,  one  of  white,  and  one  of  a  washed- 
out  blue.  Once  more  she  counted  out  the  money,  and  this 
time,  "I'll  take  it  with  me,"  she  said. 

Strong  as  she  was,  the  immense  bundle  was  almost  more 
than  she  could  carry.  But  she  managed  to  make  her  way  at 
last  to  the  main  entrance,  where,  under  the  incredulous  eye 
of  the  doorman,  she  found  a  porter  waiting  with  her  dress 
making  form. 

"That's  mine,"  she  said.  "Doris  Dane  is  the  name  on  it." 
Then,  to  the  doorman  as  the  porter  made  off,  "Will  you  get 
me  a  cab  ?" 

But  this  particular  store  had,  quite  naturally,  no  facilities 
for  doing  a  carriage  business,  a  fact  which  the  doorman 
laconically  explained. 

"All  right,"  said  Rose  dumping  her  heavy  bundle  beside 
the  dressmaking  form.  "You  won't  mind  keeping  an  eye  on 
this  for  a  minute,  will  you?"  She  didn't  actually  smile,  but 
there  was  in  her  face  a  humorous  appreciation  of  the  fact 
that  a  mountain  like  this  wouldn't  be  hard  to  watch. 

The  doorman  grinned  back  at  her.  "Sure  I  will,"  he  said. 
"I'm  sorry  I  can't  leave  the  door  to  get  you  a  cab." 


306  THE    EEAL    ADVEXTTJEE 

Eose  hailed  one  that  happened  to  be  passing,  a  creaking, 
mud-bespattered  disreputable  affair  with  a  driver  to  match, 
and  briskly  drove  a  bargain  with  him.  He  announced  Avhen 
she  told  him  the  address  that  the  fare  would  be  a  dollar  and 
a  half.  She  offered  him  seventy-five  cents,  which  he,  with  the 
air  of  a  disillusioned  optimist  in  a  bitter  world,  accepted. 
"Christmas,  too !"  he  muttered  ironically. 

"Oh,  come,"  said  Eose,  grinning  up  at  him.  "How  many 
tired  people  have  you  given  free  rides  to  to-day,  on  the 
strength  of  that  ?" 

"All  right,  miss;  I  don't  complain,"  he  said.  He  did, 
though,  but  humorously,  when  Eose,  assisted  by  a  page  boy 
the  doorman  had  impressed  for  her,  carried  the  dressmaker's 
form  and  the  other  heavy  bundle  out  to  the  curb.  He  de 
clared  the  form  should  go  as  another  passenger  (it's  semi- 
human  shape  was  clearly  visible  through  the  wrappings)  and 
that  the  other  bundle  ought  to  have  a  van.  All  the  same, 
when  at  her  destination  Eose  had  paid  him,  he  came  down, 
voluntarily  from  the  box — voluntarily  but  with  a  sort  of  re 
luctance — and  carried  the  form  up  to  her  room  for  her. 

Also,  rather  incredibly,  he  refused  an  extra  quarter  she  had 
ready  for  him  when  he  had  completed  this  service.  "Just  to 
show  no  ill  feelings,"  he  said,  and  he  told  her  where  his  stand 
was  and  gave  himself  a  little  recommendation :  "Honest  and 
reliable." 

Here  in  her  close  little  room,  the  suggestion  of  an  alcoholic 
basis  for  this  generosity  obtruded  itself,  but  Eose  didn't  care. 
She  wished  him  a  merry  Christmas  and  waved  him  off  with  a 
smile. 

It  was  now  after  eight  o'clock.  Eehearsal  was  at  eight- 
thirty  and  she  had  had  nothing  to  eat  since  noon.  But  she 
stole  the  time,  nevertheless,  to  tear  the  wrappings  off  her 
"form"  and  gaze  on  its  respectable  nakedness  for  two  or  three 
minutes  with  a  contemplative  eye.  Tben,  reluctantly — it  was 
the  first  time  she  had  left  that  room  with  reluctance — she 
turned  out  the  light  and  hurried  off  to  the  little  lunch-room 
that  lay  on  the  way  to  the  dance-hall. 

She  never  again,  in  the  active  practise  of  her  profession, 


THE    END    OF    A   FIXED    IDEA  307 

knew  anything  quite  like  the  ensuing  seventy-two  hours. 
Every  stimulus  was,  of  course,  abnormally  heightened.  There 
was  the  novelty,  the  thrilling  sense  of  adventure  that  missed 
being  fear  only  through  an  inexplicable  confidence  of  success. 
And  then,  anyway,  her  imagination  was  a  virgin  field  that  had 
never  been  cropped,  and  the  luxurious  fertility  of  it  was 
amazing. 

It  was  during  that  first  rehearsal,  which  she  so  narrowly 
missed  being  late  for,  that  she  got  the  general  schemes  for 
both  sets  of  costumes.  That  there  must  be  a  general  scheme 
she  had  decided  at  once.  The  sextette  was  a  unit ;  none  of  the 
members  of  it  ever  appeared  without  the  others,  and  it  would 
be  immensely  more  effective,  she  perceived,  if  this  fact  were 
expressed  somehow  in  the  costumes.  Not  by  means  of  a  stupid 
uniformity,  of  course.  The  effect  she  wanted  was  subtler  than 
that.  But  if  each  one  of  the  six  costumes  that  these  girls 
first  appeared  in  could  be  made  somehow  to  express  the  same 
thing  in  a  different  way — not  only  in  different,  though  har 
monious,  colors,  but  in  different,  though  related,  forms — the 
effect  produced  by  the  six  of  them  together  would  be  im 
mensely  greater  than  the  sum  of  their  individual  effects. 

This,  of  course,  wasn't  what  Rose  said  to  herself.  She  just 
wanted  a  scheme,  and  with  ridiculous  ease,  she  got  it.  She 
didn't  even  get  it.  There  it  was  staring  at  her.  And  the 
other  scheme  for  the  evening  frocks  was  knocking  at  the  door, 
too,  eager  to  get  in  the  moment  she  could  give  it  a  chance. 
She  began  studying  the  girls  for  their  individual  peculiarities 
of  style.  Each  one  of  the  costumes  she  made  was  going  to  be 
for  a  particular  girl,  suited,  without  losing  its  place  in  the 
general  plan,  to  the  enhancement  of  her  special  approximation 
to  beauty. 

At  last,  when  a  shout  from  Galbraith  aroused  her  to  the 
fact  that  she  had  missed  an  entrance  cue  altogether,  in  her 
entranced  absorption  in  these  visions  of  hers,  and  had  caused 
that  unpardonable  thing,  a  stage  wait,  she  resolutely  clamped 
down  the  lid  upon  her  imagination  and,  until  they  were  dis 
missed,  devoted  herself  to  the  rehearsal. 

But  the  pressure  kept  mounting  higher  and  higher  and  she 


308  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

found  herself  furiously  impatient  to  get  away,  back  to  her  own 
private  wonderland,  the  squalid  little  room  down  the  street, 
that  had  three  bolts  of  cambric  in  it  and  a  dressmaker's  mani 
kin — the  raw  materials  for  her  magic ! 

Eose  couldn't  draw  a  bit.  Her  mother's  fine  contempt  for 
ladylike  accomplishments  had  even  intervened  in  the  high- 
school  days  to  prevent  her  taking  a  free-hand  course  required 
in  the  curriculum,  during  which  you  spent  weeks  making  a 
charcoal  study  of  a  bust  of  Demosthenes.  But  this  lack  never 
even  occurred  to  Rose  as  a  handicap.  She  hadn't  the  faintest 
impulse  to  make  a  beginning  by  putting  a  picture  down  on 
paper  and  making  a  dress  of  it  afterward.  She  went  straight 
at  her  materials,  or  the  equivalent  of  her  materials,  as  a 
sculptor  goes  at  his  clay.  She  couldn't  have  told  just  why  she 
had  bought  those  three  shades  of  paper  cambric. 

"I'm  really  awfully  obliged  to  you  for  having  explained  it 
to  me,"  she  told  Burton,  the  portrait  painter  long  afterward. 

"I  see !"  he  had  exclaimed,  on  the  occasion  of  an  initiatory 
visit  to  her  workroom.  "You  design  these  things  in  their 
values  first,  just  the  way  the  old  masters  used  to  paint.  Once 
you  get  the  values  in,  you  can  project  them  in  any  colors  that 
will  leave  your  value  scale  true." 

And  Rose,  as  she  said,  was  really  grateful  to  him  for  telling 
her  what  it  was  she  had  been  doing  all  the  while,  just  as  Mon 
sieur  Jourdain  was  grateful  for  the  information  that  he  had 
been  talking  prose  all  his  life  and  never  known  it. 

What  she  had  felt,  of  course,  at  the  very  outset,  was  the 
need  of  something  to  indicate  roughly  the  darks  and  lights  in 
her  design.  And,  short  of  the  wild  extravagance  of  slashing 
into  the  fabrics  themselves  and  making  her  mistakes  at  their 
expense,  she  could  think  of  nothing  better  than  the  scheme  she 
chose. 

She  came  to  the  conclusion  afterward  that  even  apart  from 
the  consideration  of  expense,  her  own  plan  was  better.  You 
got  more  vigor  somehow,  into  the  actual  construction  of  the 
thing,  if  you  could  make  it  express  something  quite  independ 
ently  of  color  and  texture. 


THE    EXD    OF    A   FIXED    IDEA  309 

Rehearsal  was  dismissed  a  little  early  that  first  night,  and 
she  was  back  in  her  room  by  eleven.  Arrived  there,  she  took 
off  her  outer  clothes,  sat  down  cross-legged  on  the  floor,  and 
went  to  work.  When  at  last,  with  a  little  sigh,  and  a  tremu 
lously  smiling  acknowledgment  of  fatigue,  she  got  up  and 
looked  at  her  watch,  it  was  four  o'clock  in  the  morning.  She'd 
had  one  of  those  experiences  that  every  artist  can  remember  a 
few  of  in  his  life,  when  it  is  impossible  for  anything  to  go 
wrong;  when  each  tentative  experiment  accomplishes  not  only 
its  purpose,  but  another  unsuspected  purpose  as  well ;  when 
the  vision  miraculously  betters  itself  in  the  execution;  when 
the  only  difficulty  is  that  which  the  hands  have  in  the  purely 
mechanical  operation  of  keeping  up. 

She  was  destined  later,  of  course,  even  during  the  achieve 
ment  of  this  first  success,  to  learn  the  comparative  rarity  of 
those  hours.  Though,  as  she  looked  back  on  it  afterward, 
the  whole  of  this  first  job  seemed  to  have  been  done  with  a 
kind  of  miraculous  facility  she  couldn't  account  for. 

And  all  through  those  five  hours,  fast  as  her  mind  flew,  ut 
terly  absorbed  as  it  seemed  to  be,  she  never  once  lost  the  con 
sciousness  of  the  almost  palpable  presence  of  Eodney  Aldrich 
there  in  the  room  with  her.  Once  she  laughed  outright  over 
the  memory  of  a  girl  who  had  tried  to  win  her  husband's 
friendship  by  studying  law.  Fancy  Rodney  trying  to  study 
costumes!  But  he  would  understand  what  it  meant  to  con 
ceive  them  and  the  sort  of  work  it  took,  once  they  were  con 
ceived,  to  project  them  as  something  objective  to  herself — 
something  that  had  to  challenge  expert  opinion;  meet  the 
exactions  of  criticism.  He'd  understand  the  thrill,  too,  of  see 
ing  them  come  up  for  judgment — the  triumph  of  getting  them 
accepted  and  paid  for. 

And,  in  the  confidence  born  of  that  understanding,  he'd 
be  able  to  offer  for  her  to  understand,  the  fundamentals  of  his 
own  work.  Not  the  dry  husks  of  technical  considerations. 
What  did  they  amount  to  anyway,  except  as  they  formed  the 
boundaries  of  the  live  thing  he  meant?  But  the  live  thing 
itself — the  tiling  that  spelled  challenge  and  work  and  victory 


310  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

for  him, — that  thing,  since  at  last  she'd  grown  to  deserve  it, 
he'd  give  her.  Freely,  fully, — just  because  he  couldn't  help 
giving  it. 

Tired  as  she  was,  she  could  hardly  bear  to  stop  work.  The 
half  finished  thing  on  the  manikin  lured  her  on  from  one 
moment  to  another.  It  was  really  insane  not  to  stop.  She 
must  get  up  at  seven-thirty,  three  hours  or  so  from  now,  in 
order  to  get  to  the  shops  ahead  of  the  crowds  and  begin  the 
selection  of  her  fabrics.  At  last,  with  a  single  movement  of 
resolution  she  turned  out  the  gas  and  undressed,  or  rather, 
finished  undressing,  in  the  dark,  amid  a  litter  of  pins  and 
paper  cambric. 

And  now,  for  the  first  time  in  this  squalid,  mean  little 
room,  the  dark  had  balm  in  it,  became  a  fragrant  miracle, 
obliterating  the  harsh  actualities  of  her  immediate  yesterdays 
and  to-morrows,  winging  her  spirit  for  a  breathless  flight 
straight  to  the  end  she  sought, — to  the  time  when  the  long 
pilgrimage  before  her  should  be  accomplished. 

What  a  wonderful  thing  Rodney's  cool  firm  friendship 
would  be !  Worth  anything,  anything  in  the  world  it  might 
cost  to  win  it.  But  .  .  .  But  .  .  . 

She  drew  in  a  long  unsteady  breath  and  pressed  her  cooling 
hands  down  upon  her  face. 

What  a  thing  his  love  would  be,  when  it  should  come,  free 
of  its  tasks  and  obligations ;  no  longer  in  the  treadmill  making 
her  world  go  round,  but  given  its  wings  again ! 


CHAPTER  VIII 

SUCCESS — AXD   A   RECOGNITION 

THERE  is  a  kaleidoscopic  character  about  the  events  of  the 
ten  days  or  so  preceding  the  opening  performance  of  most 
musical  comedies  which  would  make  a  sober  chronicle  of  them 
seem  fantastically  incredible ;  and  this  law  of  Nature  made  no 
exception  in  the  case  of  The  Girl  Up-stairs.  There  were  re 
hearsals  which  ran  so  smoothly  and  swiftly  that  they'd  have 
done  for  performances;  there  were  others  so  abominably  bad 
that  the  bare  idea  of  presenting  the  mess  resulting  from  six 
weeks'  toil,  before  people  who  had  paid  money  to  see  it,  was  a 
nightmare. 

As  the  nervous  pressure  mounted,  people  took  to  exploding 
all  over  the  place  in  the  most  grotesquely  inconceivable  ways 
and  from  totally  unpredictable  causes.  Freddy  France,  who 
played  the  comic  detective  (like  most  comedians  he  had  no 
sense  of  humor  whatever  and  treated  his  "art"  with  a  sort  of 
sacrificial  solemnity),  developed  delusions  of  persecution,  pro 
claimed  himself  the  victim  of  a  conspiracy  to  which  the  own 
ers,  the  author,  Galbraith  and  most  of  the  principals  were  par 
ties,  and  finally,  when  the  director  cut  out  a  little  scene  that 
he  had  two  feeble  jokes  in,  reached  up  unexpectedly  and  hit 
McGill  on  the  nose,  flung  his  part  on  the  stage,  stamped  on 
it  and  left  the  theater.  Quan  read  his  lines  in  a  painstaking 
manner  for  two  days  and  then,  after  a  three-hour  session  in 
the  Sherman  House  bar,  Freddy  was  induced  to  come  back. 

Stewart  Lester,  one  day,  at  the  end  of  a  long  patient  effort 
of  Galbraith's  to  improve  his  acting  (he  acted  like  a  tenor; 
one  needn't  say  more  than  that),  licked  his  thin  red  lips,  and 
in  a  feline  fury,  announced  his  indifference  as  to  whether  the 
management  accepted  his  resignation  or  that  of  Miss  Dever- 
eux.  As  long  as  she  insisted  on  treating  her  vis-a-vis  like  a 

311 


312  THE    REAL   ADYEXTURE 

chorus-man,  she'd  perhaps  be  happier  if  a  chorus-man  were 
given  the  part ;  and  he  would  be  only  too  happy,  in  case  the 
management  agreed  with  her,  to  make  the  substitution  possi 
ble.  Whereupon  Miss  Devereux  remarked  that  even  having 
been  a  failure  in  grand  opera  didn't  necessarily  assure  a  man 
success  in  musical  comedy,  and  that  possibly  a  chorus-man 
would  be  an  improvement.  Galbraith  had  a  long  private  con 
ference  with  each  of  them — the  fact  that  they  would  not  speak 
at  all  off  stage  guaranteed  him  against  their  comparing  notes 
as  to  what  he'd  said — and  while  the  thing  he  effected  could 
not  be  called  a  reconciliation,  it  amounted  to  a  sort  of  armed 
truce.  They  went  through  their  love  scenes  without  actually 
scratching  and  biting. 

Even  little  Anabel  Astor,  whose  good  humor  for  a  long 
time  had  seemed  invincible,  tempestuously  left  the  stage  one 
day  in  the  middle  of  one  of  her  scenes  with  her  dancing  part 
ner,  and  could  be  heard  sobbing  loudly  in  the  wings  through 
all  that  remained  of  that  rehearsal. 

Queer  things  began  happening  to  the  plot,  resulting  some 
times  from  the  violent  transposition  of  song  numbers  from 
one  act  to  another,  sometimes  from  the  interpolation  of  songs 
or  specialties.  Two  or  three  scenes,  which  the  author  regarded 
with  special  pride  and  was  prepared  to  die  in  the  defense  of, 
were  pronounced  by  Galbraith  to  be  junk.  He  had  made  su 
perhuman  efforts,  he  told  Goldsmith  and  Block,  to  put  a  little 
life  into  them,  and  had  demonstrated  that  this  miracle  was 
impossible  of  performance.  They  were  dead  and  they'd  got 
to  be  buried  before  they  became,  to  the  olfactory  sense,  any 
more — unpleasant. 

There  was  an  ominous  breathlessness  in  the  air  after  this 
ultimatum  had  been  delivered,  and  at  the  next  rehearsal,  when 
the  director  announced  the  cut  of  six  solid  pages  of  manu 
script,  the  voice  of  the  author  was  heard  from  back  of  the  hall 
proclaiming  in  a  hollow  Euripidean  bellow  that  it  was  all 
over.  He  was  going  to  his  lawyer  to  get  an  injunction  against 
the  production  of  the  piece. 

Of  all  the  persons  directly,  or  even  remotely,  affected  by 
this  nerve-shattering  confusion,  Rose  was  perhaps  the  least 


SUCCESS— AND    A   RECOGNITION"  313 

perturbed.  The  only  thing  that  really  mattered  to  her,  was 
the  successful  execution  of  those  twelve  costumes.  The  phan 
tasmagoria  at  North  End  Hall  was  a  regrettable,  but  neces 
sary,  interruption  of  her  more  important  activities.  The  in 
terruption  didn't  interfere  so  seriously  as  at  first  she  thought 
it  would.  The  routine  of  rehearsal  as  Galbraith  developed  it, 
began  with  special  scenes — isolated  bits  that  needed  modifica 
tion  or  polishing.  The  general  rehearsals,  taking  this  act  or 
that  and  going  through  with  it  from  beginning  to  end,  and 
involving,  of  course,  the  presence  of  everybody  in  the  com 
pany,  didn't,  as  a  rule,  begin  till  three  in  the  afternoon ;  some 
times  till  as  late  as  five.  Of  course  when  they  did  begin,  they 
lasted  until  all  hours. 

But  the  labors  of  the  chorus,  and  even  of  the  sextette, 
shrank  very  much  in  proportion  to  the  work  of  the  principals. 
Nearly  all  the  changes  that  were  made  were  in  the  direction 
of  compressing  the  chorus  and  giving  the  principals  more 
room.  So  that  for  long  stretches  of  time,  during  which, 
dressed  in  her  working  clothes  and  curled  up  in  one  of  the 
remoter  of  the  cushioned  window-seats,  but  ready  to  answer 
a  summons  to  the  stage  as  promptly  as  a  fireman,  she  could 
let  her  mind  run  without  interruption  on  the  solution  of 
some  of  her  own  problems,  and  then  be  ready  when  she  went 
back  to  her  room,  to  fall  into  bed  and  asleep  (the  two  acts  had 
become  practically  simultaneous)  secure  in  the  possession  of  a 
clearly  thought  out  program  for  the  morrow. 

She  wakened  automatically  at  half  past  seven  and  was 
down-town  by  half  past  eight,  to  do  whatever  shopping  the 
work  of  the  previous  day  revealed  the  need  of.  The  fact  that 
it  was,  for  the  greater  part,  John  Galbraith's  money  she  was 
spending  (she  had  managed  to  put  in  a  little  herself  by  calcu 
lating  down  to  a  fine  point  the  necessary  margin  for  exist 
ence)  worked  to  her  advantage  in  these  operations.  She 
could  not,  but  for  that  fact,  have  forced  herself  to  hunt  down 
bargains  so  persistently  nor  to  keep  the  incidental  expense  for 
findings  and  such,  so  low. 

At  nine-thirty  in  the  morning — an  unheard  of  hour  in  the 
theater — the  watchman  at  the  Globe  let  her  in  the  stage  door, 


314  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

and  Rose  had  half  an  hour  before  the  arrival  of  the  wardrobe 
mistress  and  her  assistant,  for  looking  over  the  work  done 
since  she  had  left  for  rehearsal  the  day  before. 

She  liked  this  quiet,  cavernous  old  barn  of  a  place  down 
under  the  Globe  stage;  liked  it  when  she  had  it  to  herself 
before  the  two  sewing  women  came  and  later,  when,  with  a 
couple  of  sheets  spread  down  on  the  floor  she  cut  and  basted 
according  to  her  cambric  patterns,  keeping  ahead  of  the  fly 
ing  needles  of  the  other  two.  After  her  own  little  room,  the 
mere  spaciousness  of  it  seemed  almost  noble.  She  even  liked 
it,  when,  about  half  past  one  in  the  afternoon,  on  matinee 
clays,  the  chorus-girls  of  the  show  now  drawing  to  the  end  of 
its  run,  began  dawdling  in,  passing  shrill  jokes  with  Bill 
Flynn,  the  fireman,  rummaging  through  the  mail  in  the  let 
ter-box,  casually  unfastening  their  clothes  all  the  while,  pre 
liminary  to  kimonos  and  make-up,  gathering  in  little  knots 
about  the  sewing-machines  and  exclaiming  in  profane  delight 
over  the  costumes.  She  wondered  at  herself,  sometimes,  for 
having  ceased  to  mind  their  language,  their  shameless  way  of 
going  half-clad,  their  general  atmosphere  of  moth-like  worth- 
lessness — and  then  laughed  at  herself  for  wondering ! 

How  would  her  own  quality  be  finer,  her  soul  a  more  ample 
thing,  for  the  keeping,  on  one  of  the  shelves  of  it,  of  a  pot  of 
carefully  preserved  horror?  If  she  could  succeed  with  these 
costumes,  her  success,  she  hoped,  would  lead  her  directly  into 
the  business  of  designing  other  costumes  for  the  stage.  And 
if  she  became  a  professional  stage  costumer,  this  rather  loose, 
ramshackle,  down-at-the-heel  morality  of  back-stage  musical 
comedy  would  be  a  permanent  fact  in  her  life,  just  as  the 
dustiness  of  law-books  and  the  stuffiness  of  court  rooms  were 
permanent  facts  in  Rodney's. 

As  the  work  went  on,  her  confidence  in  the  success  of  this 
initiatory  venture  became  less  ecstatic  and  more  reasonable. 
A  few  of  the  costumes  were  finished  and,  seen  on  live  models 
(a  couple  of  girls  in  the  chorus  in  the  Globe  show  had  volun 
teered  to  try  on)  were,  if  Rose  knew  anything  at  all  about 
clothes,  without  doubt  or  qualification,  good. 

She  had  had  just  one  really  bad  quarter  of  an  hour  over 


SUCCESS—AND    A   EECOGNITIOX  315 

them,  and  that,  back  on  Christmas  Day  as  it  happened,  was 
when  Galbraith,  having  detained  her  after  he  had  dismissed 
the  rehearsal,  asked  to  see  her  sketches. 

"Sketches  !"  she  echoed,  perplexed. 

"Oh,  I  don't  mean  regular  water-colored  plates,"  he  said. 
"Just  whatever  rough  drafts  of  the  things  you  will  have  put 
down  on  paper  to  start  yourself  off  with.  It's  simple  curiosity, 
you  understand." 

''But,"  she  gasped,  "I  haven't  put  anything  down  on  paper 
— not  anything  at  all !  I  don't  know  how  to  draw." 

And  now  he  was  perplexed  in  turn.  How  could  one  design 
a  costume  without  drawing  a  picture  of  it  ? 

She  explained  her  working  method  to  him ;  though  not,  she 
felt,  very  successfully.  She  was  perhaps  a  bit  flustered,  and 
he  didn't  seem  to  be  giving  her  his  complete  attention — 
seemed  to  be  covering  up,  with  the  pretense  of  listening,  a 
strong  interior  abstraction. 

This  was  again  a  good  diagnosis  as  far  as  it  went.  Only  it 
didn't  dig  in  far  enough  for  even  the  faintest  surmise  as  to 
what  the  nature  of  his  abstraction  was. 

"I  could  bring  the  patterns  down  here.  Or,  if  you  had 
time,  you  could  come  up  to  my  room  and  see  them.  But  I'm 
afraid  you  couldn't  tell  much  from  that,  because  they're  all 
taken  apart,  you  see,  and  they're  just  in  paper  cambric  and 
not  the  right  colors." 

What  the  man  was  struggling  for — it  had  been  his  sole  rea 
son  for  detaining  her  in  the  first  place — was  some  sort  of 
opening  that  would  make  it  seem  natural  to  tell  her  he  hoped 
her  Christmas  Day  had  not  been  too  intolerably  unhappy;  to 
shake  hands  with  her  and  wish  her  luck — assure  her  in  one 
way  or  another,  that  she  had  in  him  a  friend  she  could  bring 
her  troubles  to — any  sort  of  troubles.  He'd  made  up  his  mind 
to  do  this  when  the  Christmas  rehearsal  should  be  over,  as 
long  ago  as  the  night  of  their  walk  down  the  avenue.  This 
resolution  had  been  reinforced  by  the  look  he  had  caught  in 
her  face  when  she  came  up  to  rehearsal  this  afternoon — a 
rather  misty,  luminous,  exalted  look, — a  little  lack  of  defini 
tion  about  her  eyelids  suggesting  there  had  been  tears  there. 


316  THE   HEAL   ADVENTURE 

This  was  good  observation  like  her  own  of  him.  But,  again 
like  hers,  in  its  failure  to  get  the  central  clue,  it  only  mislead 
him  the  worse.  If  he  could  have  guessed  that  she  had  been 
having  a  Christmas  celebration  of  her  own  that  day;  that 
there  had  been  unwrapped  and  displayed,  three  little  presents 
she  had  bought  the  day  before ;  one  for  her  husband,  and  one 
for  each  of  her  two  babies,  and  that,  just  before  starting  for 
rehearsal,  she  had  wrapped  them  up  and  put  them  into  her 
trunk  to  await  the  day  when  they  could  be  given,  it  might 
have  altered  matters  somewhat. 

The  thing  that  finally  made  it  clearly  impossible  for  Gal- 
braith  to  express  anything  at  all  of  this  feeling  which  he,  in 
good  faith,  called  friendship  for  her,  was  her  alternative 
offer — if  he  had  time,  to  take  him  up  to  her  room  for  a  look 
at  the  patterns. 

If  she's  seen  him  as  anything  at  all  but  starkly  her  em 
ployer  and  her  financier;  if  she's  had  the  faintest  glimmer  of 
him  as  one  who  held  for  her  any  personal  feelings  whatever, 
she  never  would  have  suggested  as  an  alternative  to  her  bring 
ing  the  patterns  here  to  rehearsal,  his  coming  up  to  her  room 
for  a  look  at  them. 

The  thing  of  all  others  that  irritated  Galbraith  was  the 
possession  of  a  divided  mind.  Just  now,  disappointed  as  he 
was,  almost  to  the  point  of  pain,  though  he  wouldn't  acknowl 
edge  to  himself  that  it  went  as  far  as  that,  over  the  evident 
fact  that  his  relation  to  the  girl,  in  spite  of  their  partnership, 
was  exactly  what  it  had  been  from  the  beginning,  he  was  still 
aware  that  if  he'd  got  the  opening  he  wanted,  had  managed 
another  of  those  warm  lithe  hand-clasps  with  her,  and  had 
got  the  notion  across  to  her  that  he  wanted  her  to  make  a 
friend  of  him  and  a  confidant,  he'd  be  going  away  now,  after 
ward,  under  the  painful  misgiving  that  he  was  a  bit  of  an  old 
fool.  The  product  of  all  this  irritation  was,  however,  that 
he  declined  Rose's  offer  of  a  view  of  her  patterns  rather 
bruskly. 

"It  was  just  curiosity,  as  I  said.  Go  along  your  own  way 
and  don't  worry  about  me.  You  will  be  all  right." 

Rose  couldn't  feel  much  conviction  behind  this  expression 


SUCCESS— AND   A   RECOGNITION  317 

of  confidence,  and  she  went  away,  as  I  have  said,  in  a  sort 
of  panic.  Was  she  all  wrong,  after  all  ?  Couldn't  you  design 
stage  costumes  except  by  making  pictures  of  them?  She 
knew  what  he  meant  by  water-colored  plates.  She'd  seen 
them  framed  in  the  lobbies  at  musical  shows  she'd  been  to 
with  Rodney.  That  was  how  costume  designers  worked,  was 
it?  Well  she  knew  she  never  could  do  anything  like  that. 

But  her  fears  only  lasted  until  she  got  back  to  her  room 
and  caught  a  reassuring  look  at  the  pattern  that  was  assem 
bled  on  the  form.  After  all,  the  pictures  in  the  lobby  weren't 
so  important  as  the  costumes  on  the  stage.  And  as  for  Gal- 
braith — well,  if  he  didn't  expect  too  much  of  her,  that  was 
all  the  better. 

In  keeping  with  the  good  luck  which  had  attended  every 
thing  that  happened  in  connection  with  this  first  venture  of 
hers,  she  was  able  to  tell  Galbraith  that  both  sets  of  costumes 
were  done  and  ready  to  try  on,  on  the  very  day  he  announced 
that  the  next  rehearsal  would  be  held  at  ten  to-morrow  morn 
ing  at  the  Globe.  It  might  very  easity  have  happened,  of 
course,  that  Rose's  enterprise,  together  with  Galbraith's  part 
nership  in  it,  had  become  known  here  or  there,  got  passed 
on  from  one  to  another,  with  modifications  and  embellish 
ments  according  to  fancy,  and  grown  to  be  a  monument  of 
scandal  and  conjecture.  But  nothing  is  more  capricious  than 
the  heat-lightning  of  gossip,  and  it  just  chanced  that,  up  to  the 
morning  of  Eose's  little  triumph,  no  one  beyond  Galbraith 
and  Rose  herself  even  suspected  the  identity  with  Dane  of  the 
chorus,  of  the  costumer  who  was  to  submit,  on  approval,  gowns 
for  the  sextette.  The  fact,  of  course,  was  bound  to  come  out 
on  the  day  the  company  moved  over  for  rehearsals  to  the 
Globe,  and  the  event  was  very  happily  dramatized  for  Rose, 
by  her  ability  to  let  the  costumes  appear  first  and  her  author 
ship  of  them  only  after  their  success  was  beyond  dispute. 

She  persuaded  the  girls  to  wait  until  all  six  were  dressed 
in  the  afternoon  frocks  and  until  she  herself  had  had  a  chance 
to  give  each  of  them  a  final  inspection  and  to  make  a  few  last 
touches  and  readjustments.  Then  they  all  trooped  out  on 
the  stage  and  stood  in  a  row,  turned  about,  walked  here  and 


318  THE    REAL'   'ADVENTURE 

there,  in  obedience  to  Galbraith's  instructions  shouted  from 
the  back  of  the  theater. 

It  was  dark  out  there  and  disconcertingly  silent.  The  glow 
of  two  cigars  indicated  the  presence  of  Goldsmith  and  Block 
in  the  middle  of  a  little  knot  of  other  spectators. 

The  only  response  Rose  got — the  only  index  to  the  effect 
her  labors  had  produced — was  the  tone  of  Galbraith's  voice. 
It  rang  on  her  ear  a  little  sharper,  louder,  and  with  more  of 
a  staccato  bruskness  than  the  directions  he  was  giving  called 
for.  And  it  was  not  his  practise  to  put  more  cutting  edge 
into  his  blade,  or  more  power  behind  his  stroke,  than  was 
necessary  to  accomplish  what  he  wanted.  He  was  excited, 
therefore.  But  was  it  by  the  completeness  of  her  success  or 
the  calamitousness  of  her  failure  ? 

"All  right,"  he  shouted.    "Go  and  put  on  the  others." 

There  was  another  silence  after  they  had  filed  out  on  the 
stage  again,  clad  this  time  in  the  evening  gowns — a  hollow 
heart-constricting  silence,  almost  literally  sickening.  But 
it  lasted  only  a  moment.  Then, 

"Will  you  come  down  here,  Miss  Dane?"  called  Galbraith. 

There  was  a  slight,  momentary,  but  perfectly  palpable  shock 
accompanying  these  words — a  shock  felt  by  everybody  within 
the  sound  of  his  voice.  Because  the  director  had  not  said, 
"Dane,  come  down  here."  He  had  said,  "Will  you  come  here, 
Miss  Dane?"  And  the  thing  amounted,  so  rigid  is  the  eti 
quette  of  musical  comedy,  to  an  accolade.  The  people  on 
the  stage  and  in  the  wings  didn't  know  what  she'd  done,  nor 
in  what  character  she  was  about  to  appear,  but  they  did  know 
she  was,  from  now  on,  something  besides  a  chorus-girl. 

Eose  obediently  crossed  the  runway  and  walked  up  the 
aisle  to  where  Galbraith  stood  with  Goldsmith  and  Block, 
waiting  for  her.  She  was  still  feeling  a  little  numb  and 
empty. 

Galbraith,  as  she  came  up,  held  out  a  hand  to  her.  "I  con 
gratulate  you,  Miss  Dane,"  he  said.  "'They're  admirable. 
With  all  the  money  in  the  world,  I  wouldn't  ask  for  anything 
handsomer." 

Before  she  could  say  anything  in  reply,  he  directed  her 


SUCCESS—AND   'A   RECOGNITION  319 

attention,  with  a  nod  of  the  head,  to  the  partners,  and  walked 
away,  Eose  gasped  at  that.  She'd  never  thought  beyond 
him — beyond  the  necessity  of  pleasing  him;  and  that  he'd 
carry  the  details  of  the  business  through  with  Goldsmith  and 
Block,  she'd  taken  for  granted.  Now,  here  she  was  chucked 
into  the  water  and  told  to  swim.  She'd  never  in  her  life,  of 
course,  tried  to  sell  anything.  What  her  mind  first  awoke  to 
was  that  the  partners  were  looking  rather  blank.  Block, 
indeed,  let  his  eyes  follow  the  retreating  Galbraith  with  a 
momentary  look  of  outraged  astonishment.  Her  wits,  quick 
ened  by  the  emergency,  interpreted  the  look.  Galbraith, 
chucking  her  into  the  water  indeed,  had  thrown  her  a  life- 
preserver — the  tip  that  her  wares  were  good. 

Goldsmith,  quicker  and  shrewder  than  his  junior,  was  al 
ready  smiling  politely.  "They  really  are  very  good,"  he  said. 
"If  they  are  not  too  expensive  for  us,  we'll  consider  buying 
them." 

"They'll  be,"  said  Eose,  "the  twelve  of  them,  four  hundred 
and  sixty-five  dollars."  She  had  something  the  same  feeling 
of  astonishment  on  hearing  herself  say  this,  that  she'd  had 
when  she  heard  herself  telling  Galbraith  that  she'd  design 
the  costumes.  Something  or  other  had  spoken  without  her 
will — almost  without  her  knowledge.  She  had  one  figure 
clearly  etched  in  her  brain;  that  was  the  one  hundred  and 
ninety  dollars  she  must  pay  back  to  Galbraith ;  and  she'd  put 
in  fifty  of  her  own.  There  was  also  a  matter  of  twenty  dol 
lars  or  so  still  to  be  paid  to  the  wardrobe  mistress  and  her 
assistant.  But  this  four  hundred  and  sixty-five  dollars  had 
simply  come  out  of  the  air. 

Block  pursed  his  lips  and  emitted  a  fine  thin  whistle  of 
astonishment. 

Goldsmith  heaved  a  sigh.  "My  dear  young  lady,"  he  pro 
tested.  "The  inducement  held  out  to  us  to  wait  for  these  cos 
tumes  of  yours,  was  that  they  were  to  be  cheap.  But  four 
hundred  and  sixty-five  dbllars  is  ridiculous !  That's  a  lot 
of  money." 

"Quite  a  lot  less,"  said  Eose,  "than  the  ones  Mrs.  Gold 
smith  picked  out  came  to.  They  were  just  over  six  hundred." 


320  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

Goldsmith  smiled  indulgently.  "By  the  figures  on  the  tags, 
yes,"  he  said.  "But  would  we  have  paid  that,  do  you  think  ? 
Those  figures  represent  what  they'd  like  to  get  from  people 
who  buy  one  apiece.  But  from  us,  buying  twelve  .  .  ."  He 
shrugged  his  shoulders  expressively. 

"Well,  this  was  reasonable  and  no  doubt  true  and  it  left 
Rose  rather  aghast.  She  turned  away  toward  the  stage  with 
the  best  appearance  of  indifference  she  could  muster.  Her 
mind  was  making  an  agonized  effort  to  add  up  one  hundred 
and  ninety,  fifty  and  twenty.  But  in  the  excitement  of  the 
moment  it  simply  balked — rejected  the  problem  altogether. 
She  didn't  think  that  the  total  came  to  much  over  three  hun 
dred  dollars,  but  she  couldn't  be  sure.  And  then  there  was, 
sticking  burr-like,  somewhere,  the  consciousness  of  another 
hundred  unaccounted  for  in  this  total.  Until  she  could  dis 
cover  what  the  gowns  had  actually  cost  her,  she  couldn't  say 
anything.  Therefore,  she  just  stood  where  she  was  and  said 
nothing  whatever. 

Goldsmith  cleared  his  throat.  "Really,"  he  said  in  an  in 
tensely  aggrieved  tone,  "you  must  try  to  see  it  from  our  point 
of  view.  This  production's  cost  us  thousands  of  dollars.  If 
we  bankrupt  ourselves  before  the  opening  night  it  will  be  a 
bad  business  for  everybod}'.  You  ought  to  see  that.  The  cos 
tumes  are  very  nice,  I  admit  that.  But  remember  we  took 
a  chance  on  it.  We  waited  for  them  with  the  idea  that  you'd 
cooperate  with  us  in  saving  money." 

Rose  made  a  last  frantic  struggle  to  induce  her  figures 
to  add  up,  but  they  were  getting  more  meaningless  every 
minute. 

There  was  another  moment  of  silence.  Then  Block  took 
up  the  refrain  with  variations.  But  just  as  he  began  to  speak, 
a  brilliantly  luminous  ray  of  light  struck  Rose.  She  could 
have  answered  Goldsmith's  arguments — would  have  done  so, 
but  for  her  preoccupation  with  that  trifling  sum  in  arithmetic. 
But  it  was  incomparably  better  tactics  not  to  answer  at  all. 
Because  if  she  could  answer  their  arguments,  they  in  turn 
could  answer  hers.  She'd  be  a  child  in  their  hands  once  she 
began  to  talk.  But  her  silence  disconcerted  them — gave  them 


SUCCESS—AND    A   RECOGNITION  321 

nothing  to  go  on.  "Well,  then,  she'd  let  them  do  the  work  and 
see  what  happened. 

But  suppose,  through  her  stubborn  insistence,  they  should 
refuse  the  costumes  at  any  price !  Well,  the  world  wouldn't 
come  to  an  end.  She'd  live  through  it  somehow,  and  some 
how  she'd  manage  to  repay  Galbraith. 

The  partners  went  on  talking  alternately  with  symptoms 
of  rising  impatience. 

"Oh,  come,"  said  Block  at  last,  "we  can't  be  all  day  about 
this !  Your  figure  is  out  of  all  reason.  If  you'd  said  even 
four  hundred  now  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Goldsmith.  "We  want  to  be  liberal.  We 
appreciate  you've  done  a  good  job.  Say  four  hundred  and 
I'll  write  you  a  check  for  it  now."  He  took  a  small  check 
book  and  a  fountain  pen  out  of  his  pocket.  "That's  all  right, 
eh?" 

Rose  made  another  effort  at  addition.  A  hundred  and 
ninety,  and  fifty,  and  twenty,  and  the  other  ghostly  hundred 
that  wouldn't  account  for  itself  and  jet  insisted  on  coming 
in  and  mixing  everything  up.  She  turned  on  the  two  part 
ners  a  look  of  perfectly  genuine  distress. 

"If  you'll  let  me  go  away  and  add  it  up  .    .    ."  she  began. 

Goldsmith's  heart  was  touched.  The  costumes  were  a  bar 
gain  at  four  hundred  and  sixty-five,  and  he  knew  it.  There 
was  an  indescribable  sort  of  dash  to  them  that  would  lend 
tone  to  the  whole  production.  And  then  the  face  of  that  pretty 
young  girl  who  must  have  worked  so  desperately  hard  to 
make  them  and  who  was  so  obviously  helpless  at  this  bar 
gaining  game,  would  have  moved  a  harder  heart  than  his. 

"Oh,  all  right !"  he  said.  "We'll  give  in.  Four  hundred" 
— he  began  making  out  the  check,  but  his  hand  hung  over  it 
a  moment— "and  fifty.  How's  that?" 

Rose  drew  in  a  long  breath.    "That's  all  right,"  she  said. 

It  was  just  as  she  turned  away  with  the  check  made  out  to 
Boris  Dane  in  her  wrist-bag,  that  the  mystery  of  that  phan 
tom  hundred  dollars  solved  itself.  It  was  the  hundred  dol 
lars  she'd  borrowed  from  Rodney  and  could  now  return  to 
him! 


323  THE   EEAIi   ADVENTURE 

Galbraith  took  the  first  chance  he  could  make  to  shoot  her 
a  low-voiced  question.  "How  much  did  you  get?"  he  asked, 
and  his  face  showed  downright  surprise  when  she  told  him. 
"That's  a  pretty  fair  price,"  he  commented.  "I  was  afraid 
they'd  screw  you  way  down  on  it,  and  I  wanted  to  help  you 
out,  hut  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  you  did/'  said  Rose.  "Telling  me  they  were  good. 
Of  course  you  couldn't  have  done  anything  more.  The  first 
thing  I  want  to  do,"  she  went  on,  "is  to  pay  you  back.  But 
I  don't  know  just  how  to  do  it.  I  can't  go  to  the  bank  where 
they  know  me  and — anyway,  the  name  on  the  check  isn't 
right." 

He  told  her  how  easily  that  could  be  fixed.  He'd  take  her 
to  the  bank  he  used  here  in  town  and  identify  her.  Then  she 
could  pay  him  and  deposit  the  balance  to  her  own  account. 
It  was  a  bank  where  they  didn't  mind  small  accounts.  That 
would  be  much  better  than  carrying  her  money  around  with 
her  where  it  could  too  easily  be  stolen. 

He  was  very  kind  about  it  all  and  they  put  the  program 
through  that  day.  Yet  she  was  vaguely  conscious  of  a  sense 
that  he  seemed  a  little  chilled,  as  if  something  about  the 
transaction  unaccountably  depressed  him. 

And  indeed  it  was  true  that  he'd  have  found  his  tendency 
to  fall  in  love  with  her  a  good  deal  harder  to  resist  if  she'd 
shown  herself  more  helpless  in  the  hands  of  Goldsmith  and 
Block.  She'd  actually  driven  a  good  bargain — an  unaccount 
ably  good  bargin !  He  wished  he'd  been  on  hand  to  see  how 
she  did  it.  Well,  women  were  queer,  there  was  no  getting 
away  from  that. 

But  Goldsmith  and  Block  came  back  the  next  day  and 
drove,  in  turn,  a  good  bargain  of  their  own. 

"You've  certainly  got  a  good  eye  for  costumes,  Miss  Dane," 
Goldsmith  said,  "and  here's  a  proposition  we'd  like  to  make. 
A  lot  of  these  other  things  we've  got  for  the  regular  chorus 
don't  look  so  good  as  they  might.  You'll  be  able  to  see 
changes  in  them  that'll  improve  them  ma}rbe  fifty  per  cent. 
.Well,  you  take  it  on,  and  we'll  begin  paying  you  your  regular 


SUCCESS—AND    A   RECOGNITION  323 

salary  now;  you  understand,  twenty-five  dollars  a  week,  be 
ginning  to-day." 

Rose  accepted  this  proposition  with  a  warm  flush  of  grati 
tude.  It  indicated,  she  felt,  that  they  were  still  friendly 
toward  her,  disposed  of  certain  misgivings  she'd  experienced 
the  night  hefore,  lest  in  driving,  unwittingly,  so  good  a  bar 
gain  with  them,  she  had  incurred  their  enmity. 

But,  from  the  moment  her  little  salary  began,  she  found 
herself  retained,  body  and  soul,  exactly  as  Galbraith  himself 
was.  They'd  bought  all  her  ideas,  all  her  energy,  all  her  time, 
except  a  few  scant  hours  for  sleep  and  a  few  snatched  minutes 
for  meals.  She  gave  her  employers,  up  to  the  time  when  the 
piece  opened  at  the  Globe,  at  a  conservative  calculation,  about 
five  times  their  money's  worth.  Even  if  she  hadn't  been  in 
the  company  she'd  have  found  something  like  two  days'  work 
in  every  twenty-four  hours,  just  in  the  wardrobe  room.  Be 
cause  the  costumes  were  cheap  and  the  frank  blaze  of  borders, 
footlights  and  spots,  pitilessly  betrayed  the  fact.  One  set  for 
the  ponies  was  so  hopelessly  bad  that  the  owners  refused  to 
accept  them,  and  Rose,  on  the  spur  of  the  moment,  made  up 
a  costume — they  were  uniform,  fortunately — to  replace  them. 
The  wardrobe  mistress,  with  two  assistants,  and  under  Rose's 
intermittent  supervision,  managed  somehow  to  get  them  made. 
And  there  wasn't  a  single  .costume,  outside  Rose's  own  twelve, 
that  hadn't  to  be  remodeled  more  or  less. 

On  top  of  all  that,  the  really  terrible  grind  of  rehearsals 
began;  property  rehearsals,  curiously  disconcerting  at  first, 
where  instead  of  indicating  the  business  with  empty  hands, 
you  actually  lighted  the  cigarette,  picked  up  the  paper  knife, 
pulled  the  locket  out  from  under  your  dress  and  opened  it — 
and,  in  the  process  of  doing  these  things,  forgot  everything 
else  3rou  knew;  scenery  rehearsals  that  caused  the  stage  to 
seem  small  and  cluttered  up  and  actually  made  some  of  the 
evolutions  you'd  been  routined  in,  impossible.  At  last  and 
ghastliest,  a  dress  rehearsal,  which  began  at  seven  o'clock  one 
night  and  lasted  till  four  the  next  morning. 

It  would  all  have  been  so  ludicrously  easy,  Rose  used  to 


324  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

reflect  in  despair,  if,  like  the  other  girls  in  the  sextette,  she'd 
had  only  her  own  part  in  the  performance  to  attend  to — only 
to  get  into  her  costumes  at  the  right  time,  be  waiting  in  the 
wings  for  the  cue,  and  then  come  on  and  do  the  things  they'd 
taught  her  to  do.  But,  between  Goldsmith  and  Block,  who 
were  now  in  a  state  of  frantic  activity  and  full  of  insane  sug 
gestions,  and  the  wardrobe  mistress  who  was  always  having 
to  be  told  how  to  do  something,  every  minute  was  occupied. 
She  would  try  desperately  to  keep  an  ear  alert  for  what  was 
happening  on  the  stage,  in  order  to  be  on  hand  for  her  en 
trances.  But,  in  spite  of  her,  it  sometimes  happened  that 
she'd  be  snatched  from  something  by  a  furious  roar  from 
Galbraith. 

"Miss  Dane!"  And  then,  when  she  appeared,  bewildered, 
contrite.  "You  must  attend  to  the  rehearsal.  Those  other 
matters  can  be  attended  to  at  some  other  time.  If  necessary, 
I  can  stop  the  rehearsal  and  wait  till  you're  at  liberty.  But 
I  can't  pretend  to  rehearse  and  be  kept  waiting." 

She  never  made  any  excuses ;  just  took  her  place  with  a  nod 
of  acquiescence.  But  she  often  felt  like  doing  as  some  of  the 
rest  of  them  did ;  felt  it  would  be  a  perfectly  enormous  relief 
to  shriek  out  incoherent  words  of  abuse,  burst  into  tears  and 
sobs,  and  rush  from  the  stage.  Her  position — her  new  posi 
tion,  she  fancied,  would  entitle  her  to  do  that — once.  And 
then  the  notion  that  she  was  saving  up  that  luxurious  possi 
bility  for  some  time  when  it  would  do  the  most  good,  would 
bring  back  her  old  smile.  And  Galbraith,  lost  in  wonder  at 
her  already,  would  wonder  anew. 

They  followed  the  traditions  of  the  Globe  in  giving  The 
Girl  Up-stctirs  its  try-out  in  Milwaukee — four  performances ; 
from  a  Thursday  to  a  Saturday  night,  with  rehearsals  pretty 
much  all  the  time  in  between. 

About  all  that  this  hegira  meant  to  Rose  was  that  she  got 
two  solid  hours'  sleep  on  the  train  going  up  on  Thursday 
afternoon  and  another  two  hours  on  the  train  coming  back 
on  Sunday  morning.  She  had  domesticated  herself  automatic 
ally,  in  the  little  hotel  across  from  the  theater,  and  she  had 
gone  right  on  working  just  as  she  did  at  the  Globe.  Oddly 


SUCCESS— AND   A   RECOGNITION  325 

enough,  she  didn't  differentiate  much  between  rehearsals  and 
the  performances.  Perhaps  because  she  was  so  absorbed  with 
her  labors  off  the  stage ;  perhaps  because  the  thoroughly  tenta 
tive  nature  of  everything  they  did  was  so  strongly  impressed 
on  her. 

The  piece  was  rewritten  more  or  less  after  every  perform 
ance.  They  didn't  get  the  curtain  down  on  the  first  one  until 
five  minutes  after  twelve — for  even  an  experienced  director 
like  Galbraith  can  make  a  mistake  in  timing — and  the  mathe 
matically  demonstrated  necessity  for  cutting,  or  speeding,  a 
whole  hour  out  of  the  piece,  tamed  even  the  wild-eyed  Mr. 
Mills.  The  principals,  after  having  for  weeks  been  routined 
in  the  reading  of  their  lines  and  the  execution  of  their  busi 
ness,  were  given  new  speeches  to  say  and  new  things  to  do 
at  a  moment's  notice — literally,  sometimes,  while  the  perform 
ance  was  going  on.  Ghastly  things  happened,  of  course.  A 
tricky  similarity  of  cues  would  betray  somebody  into  a  speech 
three  scenes  ahead;  a  cut  would  have  the  unforeseen  effect  of 
leaving  somebody  stranded,  half-changed,  in  his  dressing- 
room  when  his  entrance  cue  came  round;  an  actor  would  dry 
up,  utterly  forget  his  lines  in  the  middle  of  a  scene  he  could 
have  repeated  in  his  sleep — and  the  amazing  way  in  which 
these  disasters  were  retrieved,  the  way  these  people  who 
hadn't,  so  far,  impressed  Rose  very  strongly  with  their  col 
lective  intelligence,  extemporized,  righted  the  capsizing  boat, 
kept  the  scene  going — somehow — no  matter  what  happened, 
gave  her  a  new  respect  for  their  claims  to  a  real  profession. 

This  was  the  great  thing  they  had,  she  concluded ;  the  qual 
ity  of  coming  up  to  the  scratch,  of  giving  whatever  it  took  out 
of  themselves  to  meet  the  need  of  the  moment.  They  weren't — 
her  use  of  this  phrase  harked  back  to  the  days  of  the  half 
back — yellow.  If  you'd  walked  through  the  train  that  took 
them  back  to  Chicago  Sunday  morning,  had  seen  them,  glum, 
dispirited,  utterly  fagged  out,  unsustained  by  a  single  gleam 
of  hope,  you'd  have  said  it  was  impossible  that  they  should 
give  any  sort  of  performance  that  night — let  alone  a  good 
one.  But  by  eight  o'clock  that  night,  when  the  overture  was 
called,  you  wouldn't  have  known  them  for  the  same  people. 


326  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

There  is,  to  begin  with,  a  certain  magic  about  make-up 
which  lends  a  color  of  plausibility  to  the  paradoxical  theory 
that  our  emotions  spring  from  our  facial  expressions  rather 
than  the  other  way  about.  Certainly  to  an  experienced  actor, 
his  paint — the  mere  act  of  putting  it  on  and  looking  at  him 
self  in  the  glass  as  it  is  applied — effects  for  him  a  solution 
of  continuity  between  his  real  self,  if  you  can  call  it  that, 
and  his  part;  so  that  fatigues,  discouragements,  quarrels,  ail 
ments — I  don't  mean  to  say  are  forgotten;  they  are  remem 
bered  well  enough,  but  are  given  the  quality  of  belonging  to 
some  one  else.  But  beyond  all  that  was  the  feeling,  on  the 
edge  of  this  first  performance,  that  they  were  now  on  their 
own.  Harold  Mills  and  the  composer,  Goldsmith  and  Block, 
John  Galbraith,  had  done  their  best,  or  their  worst,  as  the 
case  might  be.  But  their  labors  to-night  would  mean  noth 
ing  to  that  rustling  audience  out  in  front.  From  now  on  it 
was  up  to  the  company! 

The  appearance,  back  on  the  stage,  of  John  Galbraith  in 
evening  dress,  just  as  the  call  of  the  first  act  brought  them 
trooping  from  their  dressing-rooms,  intensified  this  sensa 
tion.  He  was  going  to  be,  to-night,  simply  one  of  the  au 
dience. 

As  a  sample  of  the  new  spirit,  Rose  noted  with  hardly  a 
sensation  of  surprise,  that  Patricia  Devereus  nodded  amiably 
enough  to  Stewart  Lester  and  observed  that  she  believed  the 
thing  was  going  to  go ;  and  that  Lester  in  reply  said,  yes,  he 
believed  it  was. 

Rose  herself  was  completely  dominated  by  it.  Her  nerves 
• — slack,  frayed,  numb,  an  hour  ago — had  sprung  miraculously 
into  tune.  She  not  only  didn't  feel  tired.  It  seemed  she 
never  could  feel  tired  again.  Not  even,  going  back  to  her 
university  days,  on  the  eve  of  a  class  basket-ball  game,  or  a 
tennis  match,  had  she  felt  that  fine  thrill  of  buoyant  confi 
dence  and  adequacy  quite  so  strongly ! 

It  wasn't  until  along  in  the  third  act  that  the  audience 
became,  for  her,  anything  but  a  colloid  mass — something  that 
you  squeezed  and  thumped  and  worked  as  you  did  clay,  to 
get  into  a  properly  plastic  condition  of  receptivity,  so  that 


SUCCESS— AND   A   RECOGNITION  837 

the  jokes,  the  songs,  the  dances,  even  the  spindling  little 
shafts  of  romance  that  you  shot  out  into  it,  could  be  felt  to 
dig  in  and  take  hold.  It  never  occurred  to  her  to  think  of 
it  with  a  plural  pronoun;  it  was  "it"  simply,  an  inchoate 
monster,  which  was,  as  the  show  progressed,  delightfully  loos 
ening  up,  becoming  good-humored,  undiscriminating,  stu 
pidly  infatuate;  laughing  at  things  no  human  being  would 
consider  funny,  approving  with  a  percussive  roar  things  not 
in  the  least  good ;  a  monster,  all  the  same,  whose  approbation 
gave  you  an  intense,  if  quite  unreasoning,  pleasure. 

But,  along  in  the  third  act,  as  I  said,  as  she  came  down  to 
the  footlights  with  the  rest  of  the  sextette  in  their  All  Alone 
number,  one  face  detached  itself  suddenly  from  the  pasty 
gray  surface  of  them  that  spread  over  the  auditorium;  be 
came  human — individual — and  intensely  familiar.  Became 
the  face,  unmistakably,  of  Jimmy  Wallace ! 

It  is  probable  that  of  all  the  audience,  only  two  men  saw 
that  anything  had  happened,  so  brief  was  the  frozen  instant 
while  she  stood  transfixed.  One  of  them  was  John  Galbraith, 
in  the  back  row,  and  he  let  his  breath  go  out  again  in  relief 
almost  in  the  act  of  catching  it.  He  guessed  what  had  hap 
pened  well  enough — that  she'd  recognized  one  of  those  friends 
whose  potential  horror  had  made  her  willing  to  give  up  her 
promotion  and  her  little  part — the  one  she'd  spoken  of,  per 
haps,  as  the  "only  one  that  really  mattered."  But  it  was 
all  right.  She  was  going  on  as  if  nothing  had  happened. 

The  other  man  was  Jimmy  Wallace  himself.  He  released, 
too,  a  little  sigh  of  relief  when  he  saw  her  off  in  her  stride 
again  after  that  momentary  falter.  But  he  hardly  looked 
at  the  stage  after  that ;  stared  absently  at  his  program  instead, 
and,  presently,  availed  himself  of  the  dramatic  critic's  license 
and  left  the  theater. 

But  it  wasn't  to  go  to  his  desk  and  write  his  story  (he  was 
on  an  evening  paper  and  so  had  no  deadline  staring  him  in 
the  face)  but  to  a  quiet  corner  in  his  club,  where  he  could, 
undistractedly,  think. 

From  the  moment  of  Rose's  first  appearance  on  the  stage 
he  had  been  tormented  by  a  curiosity  as  to  whether  she  was 


328  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

indeed  Rose,  or  merely  some  one  unbelievably  like  her.  Be 
cause  the  fantastic  impossibility  that  Rose  Aldrich  should  be 
a  member  of  the  Globe  chorus  was  reinforced  by  the  fact 
that  her  gaze  had  traveled  unconcernedly  across  his  face  a 
dozen  times — his  seat  was  in  the  fourth  row,  too — without  the 
slightest  flicker  of  recognition.  Of  course  the  way  she  stood 
there  frozen  for  a  second,  when  at  last  she  did  see  him,  set 
tled  that  question.  She  was  Rose  Aldrich  and  she  was  in 
the  Globe  chorus! 

But  this  certainty  merely  left  him  with  a  more  insoluble 
perplexity  on  his  hands;  two,  in  fact — oh,  half  a  dozen! 
What  was  she  doing  there  ?  Did  Rodney  know  ?  Well,  those 
questions,  and  others  in  their  train,  could  wait.  But — what 
was  he  going  to  do  about  it  ? 

As  for  Rose  herself,  it  was  a  mere  automaton  that  moved 
off  in  the  dance  and  said  the  two  or  three  lines  that  remained 
to  her  in  the  act  as  if  nothing  had  happened,  because  all  her 
mind  and  all  her  capacity  for  feeling  were  occupied  and 
tested  by  something  else. 

Incredible  as  it  seems,  she  had  utterly  overlooked  Jimmy — 
overlooked  the  fact  that,  as  a  dramatic  critic,  he'd  be  cer 
tain  to  be  present  at  the  opening  performance  of  The  Girl 
Up-stalrs — certain  to  be  sitting  close  to  the  front,  and  cer 
tain,  of  course,  to  recognize  her  the  moment  she  came  on 
the  stage.  She  hadn't  even  had  him  in  mind  when  the  fear 
lest  some  one  of  Rodney's  friends  might,  for  a  lark,  drop  in 
at  the  Globe  and  recognize  her,  had  led  her  to  tell  John 
Galbraith  that  she  couldn't  be  in  the  sextette.  Since  that 
question  had  been  settled,  she'd  hardly  considered  the  possi 
bility  at  all.  And,  during  the  three  weeks  before  the  open 
ing,  since  she'd  embarked  on  her  career  as  a  costumer,  she 
literally  hadn't  given  it  a  thought. 

She  had  dreaded  various  things  as  the  hour  of  the  open 
ing  performance  drew  near — reasonable  things  like  the  fail 
ure  of  the  piece  to  please,  the  reception  of  their  offerings  in 
a  chilly  silence  intensified  by  contemptuous  little  riffles  of 
applause.  (She  had  been  in  audiences  which  had  treated 
plays  like  that — taken  her  own  part  in  the  expression  of  chill 


SUCCESS— AND    A   RECOGNITION  329 

disfavor,  and  she  knew  now  she  could  never  do  it  again.) 
She  had  dreaded  unreasonable  things,  like  the  total  failure 
of  any  audience  to  appear  and  the  necessity  of  playing  to 
empty  rows  as  they  had  done  in  rehearsal ;  nightmare  things, 
like  a  total  loss  of  memory,  which  should  leave  her  stranded 
in  the  middle  of  a  silent  stage  before  a  jeering  audience. 
But  it  hadn't  occurred  to  her  to  dread  that  the  rise  of  the 
curtain  would  reveal  to  her  any  of  the  faces  that  belonged  to 
a  world  which  the  last  six  weeks  had  already  made  to  seem 
unreal. 

So  the  sight  of  Jimmy  Wallace  had  something  the  effect 
that  a  sudden  awakening  has  on  a  somnambulist — bewil 
derment  at  first,  and  after  that  a  sort  of  panic.  Her  first 
thought  was  that  she  must  get  word  to  him,  somehow,  before 
he  left  the  theater.  Unless  she  could  do  that,  what  was  to 
prevent  his  going  straight  to  Eodney,  to-night,  and  telling 
him  all  about  it?  He  was  under  no  obligation  not  to  do  it. 
He  was  Rodney's  friend  quite  as  much  as  he  was  hers. 

It  didn't  take  her  long  to  make  up  her  mind  though  that 
he  wouldn't  do  that.  Jimmy  was  never  precipitate.  He'd 
give  her  a  chance.  To-morrow  morning  would  do.  She 
could  call  him  up  at  his  office. 

But  as  she  began  formulating  her  request  and  phrasing  the 
preface  of  explanations  she'd  have  to  make  before  she'd  be — 
well,  entitled  to  ask  a  favor  of  him,  she  found  herself  in  a 
difficulty.  She  didn't  want  to  enter  into  a  secret  with  him — 
with  any  man,  this  meant,  of  course — against  Rodney.  She 
couldn't  think  of  any  way  of  stating  her  reason  for  wanting 
her  husband  kept  in  the  dark  that  didn't  seem  to  slight  him, 
belittle  him,  make  him  faintly  ridiculous — like  the  pussy-cat 
John  Galbraith  had  snapped  his  fingers  at. 

So  she  came,  rather  swiftly  indeed,  to  the  decision  (she 
had  arrived  at  it  before  Jimmy  left  the  theater)  that  she 
wouldn't  make  any  appeal  to  him  at  all.  She'd  do  nothing 
that  could  lead  him  to  think,  either  that  she  was  ashamed  of 
herself,  or  that  she  was  afraid  Rodney  would  be  ashamed  of 
her.  In  the  absence  of  any  appeal  from  her,  mightn't  he 
perhaps  decide  that  Rodney  was  in  her  confidence  and  so 


330  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

say  nothing  about  it?     But  even  if  he  should  tell  Rodney 

In  her  conscious  thoughts  she  went  no  further  than  that; 
didn't  recognize  the  hope  already  beating  tumultuously  in  her 
veins,  that  he  would  tell  Rodney — that  perhaps  even  before  she 
got  back  to  her  dismal  little  room,  Rodney,  pacing  his,  would 
know. 

It  was  so  irrational  a  hope — so  unexpected  and  so  well  dis 
guised — that  she  mistook  it  for  a  fear.  But  fear  never  made 
one's  heart  glow  like  that. 

That's  where  all  her  thoughts  were  when  John  Galbraith 
halted  her  on  the  way  to  the  dressing-room  after  the  per 
formance  was  over. 


CHAPTEE  IX 

THE   MAN"   AXD   THE   DIRECTOR 

HE  said,  "I  want  a  talk  with  3Tou,"  and  she,  thinking  he 
meant  then  and  there,  glanced  about  for  a  corner  where 
they'd  be  tolerably  secure  against  the  charging  rushes  of  grips, 
property  men  and  electricians,  all  racing  against  time  to  get 
the  third  act  struck  and  the  first  one  set  and  make  their 
escape  from  the  theater. 

"Oh,  I  don't  mean  here  in  this  bedlam,"  he  explained  with 
a  tinge  of  impatience.  And  then  his  manner  changed.  "I'd 
like,  for  once,  a  chance  to  sit  down  with  you  where  it's — 
quiet  and  we  don't  have  to  feel  in  a  hurry."  He  added,  a 
second  later,  answering  a  shade  of  what  he  took  to  be  doubt 
or  hesitation  in  her  face,  "You're  frightfully  tired  I  know. 
If  you'd  rather  wait  till  to-morrow  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  it  wasn't  that,"  said  Rose.  "I  was  just  trying  to 
think  where  a  place  was  where  one  could  be  quiet  and  needn't 
hurry  and  where  two  people  could  talk." 

He  smiled.  "You  can  leave  that  to  me,"  he  said.  "That 
is,  if  you  don't  mind  a  restaurant  and  a  little  supper." 

"Of  course  I  don't  mind,"  she  said.  "I'd  like  it  very 
much." 

He  nodded.  "Don't  rush  your  dressing,"  he  suggested,  as 
he  moved  away.  "I've  got  plenty  to  do." 

The  sextette  dressed  together  in  a  sort  of  pen — big  enough, 
because  they  had  all  sorts  of  room  down  under  the  old  Globe 
stage,  but  so  far  as  appointments  went,  decidedly  primitive. 
The  walls  were  of  matched  boards ;  there  was  a  shelf  two  feet 
wide  or  so  around  three  sides  of  it,  to  make  a  sort  of  continu 
ous  dressing-table ;  there  were  six  mirrors,  six  deal  chairs  and 
a  few  hooks.  These  were  for  your  street  clothes.  The  stage 

331 


333  THE   REAL   ADVENTUBE 

costumes  hung  in  neat  ranks  outside  under  the  eye  of  the 
wardrobe  mistress.  When  you  wanted  to  put  one  on  you  went 
out  and  got  it,  and  if  the  time  allowed  for  the  change  were 
sufficient  you  took  it  back  into  your  dressing-room.  Other 
wise  you  plunged  into  it  just  where  you  were.  When  you 
wanted  to  wash  before  putting  on  or  after  taking  off  your 
make-up  you  went  to  a  row  of  stationary  wash-bowls  down 
the  corridor. 

All  told  it  wasn't  a  place  to  linger  in  over  the  indulgence 
of  day-dreams.  But  the  first  glimpse  Rose  caught,  as  she 
opened  the  door,  in  the  mirror  next  her  own,  was  the  en 
tranced  face  of  Olga  Larson.  The  other  girls  were  in  an  ad 
vanced  state  of  undress,  intent  on  getting  out  as  quickly  as 
the}r  could.  They  were  all  talking  straight  along,  of  course, 
but  that  didn't  delay  their  operations  a  bit.  They  talked 
through  the  towels  they  were  wiping  off  the  make-up  with, 
talked  bent  double  over  shoe-buckles,  talked  in  little  gasps 
as  they  tugged  at  tight  sweaty  things  that  didn't  want  to 
come  off.  And  they  made  a  striking  contrast  to  Olga,  who 
sat  there  just  as  she'd  left  the  stage,  without  a  hook  unfas 
tened,  in  a  rapturous  reverie,  waiting  for  Rose. 

In  the  instant  before  her  entrance  was  noticed,  Rose  made 
an  effort  to  shake  herself  together  so  that  she  should  be  not 
too  inadequate  to  the  situation  that  awaited  her. 

She  was,  of  course,  immensely  pleased  over  Olga's  little 
triumph. 

(For  it  had  been  a  triumph.  Galbraith  had  persuaded 
Goldsmith  and  Block  to  buy  the  little  Empire  dress  in  maize 
and  corn-flower;  Rose  had  done  her  hair,  and  Olga  had  been 
allowed  to  sing,  on  the  first  encore,  the  refrain  to  All  Alone, 
quite  by  herself.  She'd  gone  up  an  octave  on  the  end  of  it 
to  a  high  A,  which  in  its  perfect  clarity  had  sounded  about 
a  third  higher  and  had  brought  down  the  house.  Patricia 
had  been  furious,  of  course,  but  was  at  bottom  too  decent  to 
show  it  much  and  had  actually  congratulated  Olga  when  she 
came  off.  It  looked  as  if  she'd  really  got  her  foot  on  the 
ladder.) 

Well,  as  I  said,  Rose  was  immensely  pleased  about  it — for 


THE    MAN   AND   THE   DIBECTOB  333 

the  girl,  who  certainly  deserved  a  little  good  luck  at  last ;  for 
herself,  whose  judgment  had  heen  vindicated,  and  for  the 
show,  to  the  success  of  which  the  experiment  had  contrib 
uted.  But  she'd  have  been  a  good  deal  better  pleased  if 
Olga  could  have  taken  her  success  as  simply  her  own,  in 
stead  of  being  so  adoringly  grateful  to  Eose  about  it.  Olga 
had  been  adoring  her  with  a  somewhat  embarrassing  intensity 
ever  since  the  night  she  had  locked  her  in  her  room  and 
taught  her  to  talk. 

Eose  had  convicted  herself  here  of  a  failure  in  human  sym 
pathy,  and  had  done  her  best  to  correct  it,  without  much  avail. 
The  stubborn  fact  was  that,  wishing  Olga  all  the  good  for 
tune  in  the  world,  and  being  willing  to  take  any  amount  of 
trouble  to  bring  it  about,  she  didn't  particularly  like  her. 
And  she  flinched  involuntarily,  from  the  girl's  more  roman 
tic  and  sentimental  manifestations.  This  distaste  had  been 
heightened  by  the  fact  that  along  with  Olga's  adoration  had 
gone  a  sense  of  proprietorship,  with  its  inevitable  accompani 
ment  of  jealousy. 

Olga  bridled  every  time  she  found  Eose  chatting  with  an 
other  member  of  the  chorus,  and  when,  up  in  Milwaukee, 
Patricia  had  invited  her,  along  with  Anabel,  to  come  up  to 
her  room  for  a  little  supper  after  rehearsal,  Olga  had  been 
sulky  and  injured  for  the  whole  of  the  next  day. 

It  was  something  deeper  in  Eose  than  a  mere  surface  dis 
taste  that  made  all  this — the  caresses,  as  well  as  the  sulky 
exactions — repellent  to  her.  And  to-night,  with  her  mind 
full  of  Eoclney — full  of  that  strange  hope  that  disguised 
itself  as  fear,  the  repulsion  was  stronger  than  ever.  She 
made  an  effort  to  conquer  it.  It  would  be  a  shame  to  throw 
a  wet  blanket  on  the  girl's  attempt  to  enjoy  her  triumph  in 
her  own  way. 

So  Eose  kissed  her  and  told  her  how  pleased  she  was,  and 
good-humoredly  forbore  to  disclaim,  except  as  her  wide  smile 
did  it  for  her,  Olga's  extravagant  protestations  of  undying 
love  and  gratitude.  Eose  injected  common-sense  considera 
tions  where  she  could.  Olga  had  better  get  out  of  that  frock 
before  she  ruined  it  with  grease  paint,  and  unless  she  at 


334:  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

least  began  to  dress  pretty  soon  she'd  find  herself  locked  up 
for  the  night  in  the  theater. 

"I  wouldn't  care/'  Olga  said.  "You'd  be  locked  up,  too. 
Because  you  aren't  any  further  along  than  I  am." 

"I'm  going  to  be,  though,"  said  Eose,  "in  about  two  min 
utes."  The  thought  of  what  John  Galbraith's  disgust  would 
be,  in  spite  of  his  good-natured  assurance  she  needn't  hurry, 
if  she  really  kept  him  waiting,  set  her  at  her  task  with  flying 
fingers. 

"There's  no  use  hurrying,"  Olga  commented  on  this  burst 
of  speed,  "because  you're  going  to  wait  for  me.  This  is  my 
night.  We'll  have  a  little  table  all  by  ourselves  at  Max's  and 
then  you'll  come  up  and  sleep  with  me  to-night." 

An  instinct  prompted  Eose  to  defer  the  necessary  negative 
to  this  suggestion  until  the  last  of  the  other  girls,  who  was 
just  then  pinning  on  her  hat,  should  have  gone.  When  the 
door  clicked,  she  said  she  was  sorry  but  the  plan  couldn't  be 
carried  out. 

Olga  looked  at  her  intensely.  "I  need  you  to-night,"  she 
said,  "and  if  you  care  anything  about  me  at  all  you'll  come." 

"I'd  come  if  I  could,"  said  Eose,  "but  it  can't  be  managed. 
I've  promised  to  do  something  else." 

Olga's  face  paled  a  little  and  her  eyes  burned.  "So  that's 
it,  is  it?"  she  said  furiously.  "You're  going  out  with  Gal- 
braith."  She  went  on  to  say  more  than  that,  but  her  mean 
ing  was  plain  at  the  first  words. 

Eose  looked  at  her  a  little  incredulous,  quite  cool,  so  far 
as  her  mind  went  (because,  of  course,  Olga's  accusation  was 
merely  grotesque)  but  curiously  and  most  unpleasantly 
stirred,  disgusted  almost  to  the  point  of  nausea.  She 
stopped  the  tirade,  not  because  she  cared  what  the  girl  was 
saying,  but  because  she  couldn't  etay  in  the  room  with  a 
person  making  that  sort  of  an  exhibition  of  herself. 

It  took  no  more  than  half  a  dozen  words  to  accomplish 
this  result.  The  mere  fact  that  she  spoke,  after  that  rather 
long  blank  period  of  speechlessness,  and  the  cold  blaze  of  her 
blue  eyes  that  accompanied  her  words,  effected  more  than 
the  words  themselves.  And  then,  in  a  tempest  of  tean  and 


THE    MAN   AXD    THE    DIRECTOR  335 

eelf-reproaches,  Olga  repented  —  a  phase  of  the  situation 
which  was  worse,  almost,  than  the  former  one,  because  it 
couldn't  be  dealt  with  quite  so  summarily. 

But  Rose  went  on  dressing  as  fast  as  she  could  all  the 
while,  and  at  last,  long  before  Olga  had  begun  putting  on  her 
street  clothes,  she  was  ready  to  go.  With  her  hand  on  the 
door-latch  she  paused. 

"I  am  going  to  have  supper  with  Mr.  Galbraith,"  she  said. 
"He  told  me  there  was  something  he  wanted  to  talk  to  me 
about."  And  with  that  she  let  herself  out  of  the  room,  in 
different  to  the  effect  these  last  words  of  hers  might  produce. 

She  caught  sight  of  Galbraith  down  at  the  end  of  the  cor 
ridor  waiting  for  her,  but  she  paused  a  moment,  pulled  in  a 
long  breath  and  grinned  at  herself.  In  the  state  of  mind  she 
was  in  just  then,  divided  between  her  impatience  to  get  back 
to  her  own  room  where  her  thoughts  could  be  free  to  run 
upon  the  one  theme  they  welcomed,  and  her  wrath  and  dis 
gust  over  the  scene  Olga  had  just  subjected  her  to,  the  poor 
man  was  in  danger  of  having  a  pretty  unsatisfactory  sort  of 
hour  with  her.  She  must  brace  up  and  really  try  to  be  nice 
to  him. 

So  through  all  the  preliminaries  to  the  real  talk  which  he'd 
said  he  wanted  with  her,  she  was  consciously  as  cordial  and 
friendly  as  she  knew  how  to  be.  She  said  she  hoped  she 
hadn't  kept  him  waiting  too  long,  and  when  he  apologized 
for  taking  her  out  through  the  stage  door  and  the  alley,  with 
the  explanation  that  the  front  of  the  house  was  by  this  time 
locked,  she  made  a  good-humored  reference  to  the  fact  that 
the  alley  and  the  stage  door  were  now  her  natural  walk  in 
life,  and  that  it  was  just  as  well  she  shouldn't  be  spoiled 
with  liberties. 

He  asked  her  if  she  had  any  preference  as  to  where  they 
went  for  supper,  and  the  way  she  acknowledged,  again  with 
a  smile,  that  she'd  rather  not  go  to  Rector's,  nor  to  any  of  the 
places  over  on  Michigan  A  venue,  was  an  admission,  in  candid 
confidence,  of  the  existence  of  another  half  of  her  life  which 
ghe  wished  to  keep,  if  possible,  unentangled  with  this. 

She  showed  herself  frankly  pleased  with  the  taxi  he  pro- 


336  THE   KEAL   ADVENTURE 

vided,  sank  back  into  her  place  in  it  with  a  sigh  of  clear 
satisfaction,  and  was,,  as  far  as  he  could  see,  completely  incuri 
ous  about  the  address  he  gave  the  chauffeur.  The  place  he 
picked  out  was  an  excellent  little  chop-house  in  one  of  the 
courts  south  of  Van  Buren  Street,  a  place  little  frequented 
at  night — manned,  indeed,  after  dinner,  merely  by  the  pro 
prietor,  one  waiter  and  a  man  cook  in  the  grille,  and  kept 
open  to  avoid  the  chance  of  disappointing  any  of  the  few  epi 
curean  clients  who  wouldn't  eat  anywhere  else. 

But  neither  the  neighborhood  nor  the  loneliness  of  the 
place  got  even  so  much  as  a  questioning  glance  from  Bose. 
She  left  the  ordering  of  the  supper  to  him,  and  assented 
with  a  nod  to  his  including  with  it  a  bottle  of  sparkling 
Burgundy. 

There  is  nothing  quite  so  disconcerting  as  to  be  prepared 
to  overcome  a  resistance  and  then  to  find  no  resistance  there ; 
to  be  ready  with  convincing  arguments,  and  then  not  have 
them  called  for.  This,  very  naturally,  was  the  plight  of 
John  Galbraith. 

Eose  wasn't  a  child  even  on  the  day  when  she  came  and 
asked  him  for  a  job,  and  in  the  six  weeks  that  had  inter 
vened  since  then  she'd  been  dressing  in  the  same  room  with 
chorus-girls — hearing  the  sort  of  things  they  talked  about 
in  the  wings.  Indeed,  unless  he  was  mistaken,  she  must 
have  heard  them  linking  her  own  name  with  his.  His  very 
special  interest  in  her,  and  the  way  he'd  shown  it,  promoting 
her  to  the  sextette,  and  giving  her  a  chance  to  design  the 
costumes,  was  a  thing  they  wouldn't  have  missed  nor  failed 
to  put  their  own  construction  on.  She  must  know  then  what 
their  inferences  would  be  from  the  fact  of  his  asking  her 
out  to  supper  on  the  opening  night. 

"What  he'd  been  prepared  to  urge  was  that  now  that  his 
connection  with  the  enterprise  had  terminated,  now  that  he 
was  no  longer  a  director  and  the  representative  of  her  em 
ployers,  she  should  take  him  on  trust  simply  as  a  friend.  He 
was  prepared  to  answer  protests,  to  offer  compromises — con 
cessions  to  appearances.  He'd  expected  her  to  exhibit  some 
shyness  of  the  taxi.  According  to  his  unconscious  ideal  of 


THE   MAN   AND   THE   DIRECTOR  337 

the  situation  she  should  have  looked  questioningly  at  him — 
hesitated,  and  then  let  him  assure  her  that  it  was  all  right. 
She  should  have  gasped  a  little  when  the  car  turned  south 
in  the  dark  little  court  below  Van  Buren  Street,  have  shrunk 
a  little  at  the  isolation  the  emptiness  of  the  restaurant  en 
forced  upon  them,  and  declined,  with  something  not  far 
short  of  panic,  her  share  of  that  hottle  of  Burgundy.  Because 
all  these  flutters  and  questionings  would  just  have  opened  the 
way  for  his  assurances — perfectly  honest  assurances,  too,  as 
far  as  he  knew — of  the  candor  of  his  feelings  and  intentions 
toward  her. 

She  needed  a  friend,  that  was  plain  enough,  some  one 
who  had  her  best  interests  honestly  at  heart;  some  one  who 
knew  the  pitfalls  and  the  difficulties  of  this  pilgrimage  she'd 
so  strangely  set  out  on,  and  could  advise  her  how  to  avoid 
them.  That  he  was,  potentially,  that  friend,  he  truly  be 
lieved.  And  what  better  way  could  there  be  of  convincing 
her  of  it  than  by  persuading  her  to  trust  him,  and  then  prov 
ing  that  her  trust  had  not  been  misplaced? 

But  what  was  one  to  do — how  was  one  to  make  a  beginning 
when  she  trusted  him  without  any  persuasion?  Trusted  him 
as  a  matter  of  course,  without  the  glimmer  of  any  sort  of 
emotion  whatever;  about  as  if  he'd  been — well,  say,  her 
brother-in-law ! 

He  was  at  a  loss  for  a  peg  to  hang  his  definite  sense  of 
injury  upon.  He  couldn't  blame  the  girl  for  having  trusted 
him,  nor  for  proving  so  perfectly  adequate  to  the  unconven 
tional  situation  he'd  created.  He  couldn't  reproach  her,  even 
in  his  thoughts,  for  the  frankly  expressed  pleasure  she  took 
in  the  leisured  dignity  of  the  little  restaurant,  with  its  mod 
estly  sumptuous  appointments  (she  even  let  him  see  that  she 
appreciated  the  fineness  of  the  napery  and  the  handsomeness 
of  the  tableware;  admitted,  indeed,  how  sharply  it  contrasted 
with  what  she'd  been  used  to  lately),  nor  for  the  real  appre 
ciation  she  showed  of  the  supper  he  selected. 

But  the  moment  he  had  been  planning,  counting  on  for 
days — weeks,  if  it  came  to  that — with  an  excitement  he 
couldn't  deny,  a  tensity  that  had  increased  as  the  prospect 


338  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

of  it  drew  nearer,  was  not  exciting  nor  tense  for  her.  If 
anything,  she'd  relaxed  a  little,  as  if  the  big  moment  of  her 
day  had  passed — or,  postponed  by  this  affair  of  hie,  were  still 
to  come.  Once  or  twice  when  her  gaze  detached  itself  from 
him  and  rested  unfocused  on  the  other  side  of  the  room,  he 
saw  little  changes  of  expression  go  over  her  face  that  didn't 
relate  to  him  at  all.  He  simply  wasn't  in  focus,  that  was  the 
size  of  it.  He  had  never  seen  her  look  lovelier,  more  com 
pletely  desirable  than  she  did  right  now,  dressed  as  she  was 
in  her  very  simple  street  clothes  and  relaxed  by  the  sur 
rounding  quiet  and  comfort  and  her  own  fatigue.  And  yet, 
all  alone  with  him  as  she  had  so  confidingly  permitted  herself 
to  be,  and  near  enough  to  reach  with  the  bare  stretching  out 
of  a  hand,  she'd  never  been  further  away  nor  seemed  more 
unattainable. 

As  she  came  back  from  one  of  these  momentary  excursions 
she  found  him  staring  at  her,  and  with  a  faint  flush  and 
a  smile  of  contrition  she  pulled  herself  back,  as  it  were,  into 
his  presence. 

"I  know  you're  tired,"  he  said  bruskly.  "But  I  fancied 
you'd  be  tireder  in  the  morning  and  I  have  to  leave  for  Xew 
York  on  the  fast  train.  So,  you  see,  it  was  now  or  never." 

Strangely  enough,  that  got  her.  She  stared  at  him  a  little 
incredulous,  almost  in  consternation. 

"Do  you  mean  you're  going  away?"  she  asked.  "To-mor 
row?"  ' 

"Of  course,"  he  said  rather  sharply.  "I've  nothing  more 
to  stay  around  here  for."  He  added,  as  she  still  seemed  not 
to  have  got  it  through  her  head.  "My  contract  with  Gold 
smith  and  Block  ended  to-night,  with  the  opening  perform 
ance." 

"Of  course,"  she  said  in  deprecation  of  her  stupidity,  "I 
didn't  think  you  were  going  to  stay  indefinitely — as  long  as 
the  show  ran.  And  yet  I  never  thought  of  your  going  away. 
It's  always  seemed  that  you  were  the  show — or,  rather,  that 
the  show  was  you ;  just  something  that  you  made  go.  It 
doesn't  seem  possible  that  it  can  keep  on  going  with  you  not 
there." 


THE    MAX    AND    THE    DIRECTOR  339 

The  sincerity  of  that  made  it  a  really  fine  compliment — 
just  the  sort  of  compliment  he'd  appreciate.  But — the  old 
perversity  again — the  very  freedom  with  which  she  said  it 
spoiled  it  for  him. 

"I  may  be  missed,"  he  said — it  was  more  of  a  growl  really — 
"hut  I  shan't  be  regretted.  There's  always  a  sort  of  Halle 
lujah  chorus  set  up  by  the  company  when  they  realize  I'm 
gone." 

"I  shall  regret  it  very  much,"  said  Rose.  The  words 
would  have  set  his  blood  on  fire  if  she'd  just  faltered  over 
them.  But  she  didn't.  She  was  hopelessly  serene  about  it. 
"You're  the  person  who's  made  this  six  weeks  bearable  and, 
in  a  way,  wonderful.  I  never  could  thank  you  enough  for 
the  things  you've  done  for  me,  though  I  hope  I  may  try  to 
some  time." 

"I  don't  want  any  thanks,"  he  said.  And  this  was  com 
pletely  true.  It  was  something  very  different  from  gratitude 
that  he  wanted.  But  he  realized  how  abominably  ungracious 
his  words  sounded,  and  hastened  to  amend  them.  "What  I 
mean  is  that  you  don't  owe  me  .any.  Anything  I've  done 
that's  worked  out  to  your  advantage  was  done  because  I  be 
lieved  it  was  to  the  advantage  of  the  men  who  hired  me — 
beginning  with  the  afternoon  when  I  first  took  you  on  in 
the  chorus." 

This  didn't  satisfy  him  either.  Rose  said  nothing.  He  had 
indeed  left  her  nothing  to  say.  But  there  was  a  look  of  per 
plexity  in  her  eyes — as  if  she  were  casting  about  for  some 
stupidly  tactless  act  or  omission  of  her  own  to  account  for 
his  surliness — that  made  him  recant  altogether. 

"I  don't  know  why  in  the  world  I  should  have  said  a  thing 
like  that !"  he  burst  out.  "It  wasn't  true.  I've  wanted  to 
do  things  for  you — wanted  to  do  more  than  I  could,  and  I 
want  to  still.  You've  done  a  lot  to  make  this  show  go,  as 
well  as  it  did,  in — more  ways  than  you  know  about.  It  wasn't 
for  me,  personally,  that  you  did  it.  But  all  the  same,  I'm- 
grateful.  And  it's  to  convince  you  of  that  that  I  asked  you 
to  come  around  here  to-night." 
,  She  really  lighted  up  over  his  praise,  thanked  him  for  it 


340  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

very  prettily.  But  then,  after  a  little  silence,  she  went  on 
reflectively,  "It  was,  in  a  way,  for  you,  personally,  that  I  was 
working  all  the  time.  I  don't  know  if  I  can  explain  that, 
though  I  think  I  understand  it  myself.  But  just  because  you 
wanted  things  so  hard — you  were  so  perfectly  determined  that 
something  should  happen  in  a  certain  way — I  just  had  to 
help  bring  it  about,  or  try  to.  It  would  have  been  exciting 
enough  just  to  see  that  things  were  wrong  and  to  watch  them 
coming  right.  But  taking  hold  one's  self  and  helping  a  little 
to  make  them  come  right  was — well,  as  I  said,  wonderful." 

"Well,"  he  said — and  now  he  was  brusk  again — "I  hope 
Goldsmith  and  Block  are  satisfied.  They  won't  be,  of  course, 
unless  the  thing  runs  forty  weeks.  But  that  isn't  what  I 
want  to  talk  about.  I  want  to  talk  about  you.  I  want  to 
know  what  you're  aiming  at.  I  don't  mean  to-morrow  or 
next  week.  You'll  stay  with  this  piece,  I  suppose,  as  long  as 
the  run  lasts.  But  in  the  end,  what's  the  idea  ?  Do  you  want 
to  be  an  actress?" 

He  had  kept  on  going  after  that  first  question  of  his,  be 
cause  it  was  obvious  the  girl  wasn't  ready  to  answer.  She 
seemed  to  be  struggling  to  get  the  bearings  of  a  perfectly 
new  idea.  At  length  she  gave  him  the  clue. 

"It's  that  forty  weeks,"  she  said.  "The  notion  of  just  go 
ing  on — not  changing  anything  or  improving  anything;  do 
ing  the  same  thing  over  and  over  again  for  forty  weeks,  or 
even  four,  seems  perfectly  ghastly.  And  yet  I  suppose  that's 
what  everybody  in  the  company  is  hoping  for — just  to  keep 
going  round  and  round  like  a  horse  at  the  end  of  a  pole. 
What  I'd  like  to  do,  now  that  this  is  finished,  is — well,  to 
start  another." 

His  eyes  kindled.  "That's  it,"  he  said.  "That's  what  I've 
felt  about  you  all  along.  I  suppose  it's  the  reason  I  felt  you 
never  could  be  an  actress.  You  see  the  thing  the  way  I  do — 
the  whole  fun  of  the  game  is  getting  the  thing.  Once  it's 
got  .  .  ."  He  snapped  his  fingers,  and  with  an  eager  nod 
she  agreed. 

He  was  in  focus  now,  there  could  be  no  doubt  of  that.  But 
it  didn't  occur  to  him  that  it  was  the  director  who  was  in 


THE    MAN   AND   THE   DIRECTOR  341 

focus,  not  the  man.  The  fact  was  that  in  evoking  the  director 
she'd  banished  the  man — a  triumph  she  wasn't  to  realize  the 
importance  of  until  a  good  deal  later. 

"Well,  then,  look  here,"  he  said.  "I've  an  idea  that  I 
could  use  you  to  good  advantage  as  a  sort  of  personal  assist 
ant.  There'll  be  a  good  deal  of  work  just  of  the  sort  you  did 
with  the  sextette,  teaching  people  to  talk  and  move  about  like 
the  sort  of  folk  they're  supposed  to  represent.  That's  com 
ing  in  more  and  more  in  musical  comedies,  the  use  of  the 
chorus  as  real  people  in  the  story — accounting  for  their  exits 
and  entrances.  It  would  be  done  more  if  we  could  teach 
chorus  people  to  act  human.  Well,  you  can  do  that  better 
than  I ;  that's  the  plain  truth.  And  then  I  think  after  you'd 
got  my  idea  of  a  dance  number  you  could  probably  rehearse 
it  yourself,  take  some  of  that  routine  off  my  hands.  Under 
this  new  contract  of  mine,  that  I  expect  to  sign  in  a  day  or 
two,  I'll  simply  have  to  have  somebody.  And  then,  of  course, 
there's  the  costuming.  That's  a  great  game,  and  I've  a  no 
tion,  though  of  course  I  haven't  a  great  deal  to  go  by,  that 
you  could  swing  it.  I  think  you've  a  talent  for  it. 

"There  you  are !  The  job  will  be  paid  from  the  first  a 
great  deal  better  than  what  you've  got  here.  And  the  cos 
tuming  end  of  it,  if  you  succeed,  would  run  to  real  money. 
Well,  how  about  it  ?" 

"But,"  said  Rose  a  little  breathlessly — "but  don't  I  have 
to  stay  here  with  The  Girl  Up-stairs?  I  couldn't  just  leave, 
could  I?" 

"Oh,  I  shan't  be  ready  for  you  just  yet  anyway,"  he  said. 
"I'll  write  when  I  am  and  by  that  time  you'll  be  perfectly 
free  to  give  them  your  two  weeks'  notice.  By  the  way,  haven't 
you  some  other  address  than  care  of  the  theater — a  perma 
nent  address  somewhere?" 

"Care  of  Miss  Portia  Stanton,"  she  told  him,  and  as  he 
got  out  his  card  and  wrote  it  down,  she  added  the  California 
address.  It  recalled  to  his  mind  that  she  had  told  him  her 
name  was  Rose  Stanton  on  the  day  he  had  given  her  a  job, 
and  the  memory  diverted  him  for  a  moment.  Then  he  pulled 
himself  back. 


343  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

"They'll  be  annoyed,  of  course — Goldsmith  and  Block. 
But,  after  all,  you've  given  them  more  than  their  money's 
worth  already.  Well — will  you  come  if  I  write?" 

"It  seems  to  be  too  wonderful  to  be  true,"  she  said.  "Yes, 
I'll  come,  of  course." 

He  sat  there  gazing  at  her  in  a  sort  of  fascination.  Be 
cause  she  was  fairly  lambent  with  the  wonder  of  it.  Her 
eyes  were  starry,  her  lips  a  little  parted,  and  she  was  so  still 
she  seemed  not  even  to  be  breathing.  But  the  eyes  weren't 
looking  at  him.  Another  vision  filled  them.  The  vision — oh, 
he  was  sure  of  it  now ! — of  that  "only  one,"  whoever  he  was, 
that  mattered. 

He  thrust  back  his  chair  with  an  abruptness  that  startled 
her  out  of  her  reverie,  and  the  action,  rough  as  it  was,  wasn't 
violent  enough  to  satisfy  the  sudden  exasperation  that  seized 
him.  If  he  could  have  smashed  the  caraffe  or  something  .  .  . 

"I  wron't  keep  you  any  longer,"  he  said.  "I'll  have  them  get 
a  taxi  and  send  you  home." 

She  said  she  didn't  want  a  taxi.  If  he'd  just  walk  over 
with  her  to  a  Clark  Street  car  .  .  .  And  she  thanked  him 
for  everything,  including  the  supper.  But  all  the  time  he 
could  see  her  trying,  with  a  perplexity  almost  pathetic,  to 
discover  what  she  had  done  to  change  his  manner  again  like 
that. 

He  was  thoroughly  contrite  about  it,  and  he  did  his  best 
to  recover  an  appearance  of  friendly  good  will.  He  didn't 
demur  to  her  wish  to  be  put  on  a  car,  and  at  the  crossing 
where  they  waited  for  it,  after  an  almost  silent  walk,  he  did 
manage  to  shake  hands  and  wish  her  luck  and  tell  her  she'd 
hear  from  him  soon,  in  a  way  that  he  felt  reassured  her. 

But  he  kicked  his  way  to  the  curb  after  the  car  had  car 
ried  her  off,  and  marched  to  his  hotel  in  a  sort  of  baffled  fury. 
He  didn't  know  exactly  what  had  gone  wrong  about  the  eve 
ning.  He  couldn't,  in  phrases,  tell  himself  just  what  it  was 
he'd  wanted.  But  he  did  know,  with  a  perfectly  abysmal 
conviction,  that  he  was  a  fool ! 


CHAPTER  X 

THE   VOICE   OF   THE   WOULD 

IF  you  were  to  accost  the  average  layman,  especially  the 
layman  who  has,  at  one  time  or  another,  found  his  personal 
affairs,  or  those  of  his  friends,  casually  illuminated  by  the 
straying  search-light  of  newspaper  notoriety,  and  put  this 
hypothetical  question  to  him:  "What  chance  would  there  be 
that  a  young  married  woman,  who,  in  a  social  sense,  really 
"belonged,"  could  leave  her  husband  for  a  musical-comedy 
chorus  in  the  city  he  lived  in,  and  escape  having  the  fact 
chronicled  in  the  daily  press? — that  layman  would  tell  you 
that  there  was  simply  no  chance  at  all.  But  if  you  were  to  put 
the  same  question  to  a  person  expert  in  the  science  of  publicity 
— to  an  alumnus  of  the  local  room  of  any  big  city  daily,  you'd 
get  a  very  different  answer.  Because  your  expert  knows  how 
many  good  stories  there  are  that  never  get  into  the  papers. 
He  allows  for  the  element  of  luck;  he  knows  how  vitally  im 
portant  it  is  that  the  right  person  should  become  aware  of 
the  fact  at  exactly  the  right  time,  in  order  that  a  simple  hap 
pening  may  be  converted  into  news. 

Eose's  "escapade" — that's  how  it  would  have  been  described 
— didn't  get  into  the  papers.  Jimmy  Wallace,  of  course,  be 
fore  the  bar  of  his  own  conscience,  stood  convicted  of  high 
treason.  There  was  no  use  arguing  with  himself  that  he  was 
hired  as  a  critic  and  not  as  a  reporter.  For,  just  as  it  is  the 
doctor's  duty  to  prolong,  if  possible,  the  life  of  his  patient,  or 
the  lawyer's  duty  to  defend  his  client,  so  it  is  the  duty  of 
every  man  who  writes  for  a  newspaper,  to  turn  himself  into 
a  reporter  when  a  story  breaks  under  his  eye.  Jimmy  ought 
that  very  night  as  soon  as  he  had  made  sure  of  his  facts,  to 
have  left  a  note  on  his  city  editor's  desk  informing  him  that 
Mrs.  Eodney  Aldrich  was  a  member  of  the  chorus  in  the 
new  Globe  show. 

343 


344  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

He  didn't  do  it,  even  though  he  knew  that  a  more  trouble 
some  accuser  than  his  own  conscience — namely,  the  city  edi 
tor  himself — would  confront  him,  in  case  any  of  his  colleagues 
on  the  other  papers  had  happened  to  recognize  her  and,  duti 
fully,  had  turned  the  story  in.  He  read  the  other  papers  for 
the  next  twenty-four  hours,  rather  more  carefully  than  usual, 
and  then  with  a  sigh  of  relief,  told  his  conscience  to  go  to 
the  devil.  It  was  a  well  trained,  obedient  conscience,  and  it 
subsided  meekly. 

But  his  curiosity  was  neither  meek  nor  accustomed  to  hav 
ing  its  liberties  interfered  with,  and  it  declined  to  leave  the 
problem  alone.  Problem !  It  was  a  whole  nest  of  problems. 
If  you  isolated  one  and  worked  out  a  tolerably  satisfactory 
answer  to  it,  you  discovered  that  this  answer  made  all  the 
rest  more  fantastically  impossible  of  solution  than  before.  It 
actually  began  to  cost  him  sleep !  What  made  it  harder  to 
bear,  of  course,  was  the  tantalizing  possibility  of  finding  out 
something  by  dropping  in  at  the  Globe  during  a  perform 
ance,  wandering  back  on  the  stage,  where  he  was  always  per 
fectly  welcome,  going  up  and  speaking  to  her  and — seeing 
what  happened.  Something  more  or  less  illuminating  would 
have  to  happen.  Because,  even  in  the  extremely  improbable 
case  of  her  pretending  she  didn't  know  him,  he'd  then  have 
something  to  go  on.  He  dismissed  this  temptation  as  often 
as  it  showed  its  face  around  the  corner  of  the  door  of  his 
mind — dismissed  it  with  objurgations.  But  it  was  a  persist 
ent  temptation  and  it  wouldn't  stay  away. 

It  was  a  real  relief  to  him  when  Violet  Williamson  tele 
phoned  to  him  one  day  and  asked  him  to  come  out  to  dinner. 
There'd  be  no  one  but  herself  and  John,  she  said,  and  he 
needn't  dress  unless  he  liked.  She'd  been  in  New  York  for 
a  fortnight  and  had  only  been  back  two  days.  He  mustn't 
fail  to  come.  There  was  a  sort  of  suppressed  excitement  about 
Violet's  voice  over  the  telephone,  which  led  him  to  suspect 
she  might  be  able  to  throw  some  light  on  the  enigma. 

But  light,  it  appeared,  was  what  John  and  Violet  wanted 
from  him. 

They  were  both  in  the  library  when  he  came  in,  and  after 


THE    VOICE    OF    THE    WORLD  345 

the  barest  preliminaries  in  the  way  of  greetings  and  cigar 
ettes,  and  the  swiftest  summary  of  her  visit  to  New  York  ("1 
stayed  just  long  enough  to  begin  being  not  quite  so  furious 
with  John  for  not  taking  me  there  to  live/')  Violet  made 
a  little  silence,  visibly  lighted  her  bomb,  and  threw  it.  "John 
and  I  went  to  the  Globe  last  night  to  see  The  Girl  Up-stairs" 
she  said. 

Jimmy  carried  his  cocktail  over  to  the  fire,  drew  sharply 
on  his  cigarette  to  get  it  evenly  lighted,  and  by  that  time  had 
decided  on  his  line. 

"That's  an  amazing  resemblance,  isn't  it?"  he  said. 

"Resemblance  fiddle-dee-dee !"  said  Violet. 

John  Williamson  hunched  himself  around  in  his  chair. 
"Well,  you  know,"  he  protested  to  his  wife,  "that's  the  way 
I  dope  it  out  myself." 

"Oh,  you!"  she  said,  with  good-natured  contempt.  "You 
think  you  think  so.  Because  you've  always  been  wild  about 
Rose  ever  since  Rodney  married  her,  you  just  won't  let  your 
self  think  anything  else.  But  Jimmy  here,  doesn't  even  think 
he  thinks  so.  He  knows  better." 

"They're  the  limit,  aren't  they?"  said  John  in  rueful  ap 
peal  to  his  guest.  "They  not  only  know  what  you  think,  but 
what  you  think  you  think !  It's  a  marvelous  thing — feminine 
intuition." 

"  'Intuition/  nothing !"  said  Violet.  Then  she  rounded  on 
Jimmy. 

"How  much  have  you  found  out  about  her — this  girl  with 
the  'astonishing  resemblance'?" 

"Not  very  much,"  Jimmy  confessed.  "According  to  the 
program,  her  name  is  Doris  Dane.  I  did  ask  Block  about 
her.  He's  one  of  the  owners  of  the  piece.  But  he  couldn't 
tell  me  very  much.  She's  from  out  of  town,  he  thinks,  and 
he  said  something  about  her  being  a  dressmaker.  She  did 
some  work  for  them  on  the  costumes.  And  she  started  in 
with  this  show  as  a  chorus-girl.  But  Galbraith,  the  director, 
got  interested  in  her,  and  put  her  into  the  sextette." 

"Well,  there  we  are,"  said  John  Williamson.  "That  settles 
it.  Rose  never  was  a  dressmaker,  that's  a  cinch." 


346  THE    KEAL   ADVENTURE 

Even  Violet  seemed  a  little  shaken,  and  Jimmy  was  just 
beginning  to  congratulate  himself  on  the  skill  with  which  he 
had  modified  what  Block  had  told  him  about  the  costumes, 
when  Violet  began  on  him  again. 

"All  right !"  she  eaid.  "Where  are  we  ?  You  know  quite  a 
lot  of  people  in  that  show,  don't  you  ?"  This  was  a  rhetorical 
question.  It  was  notorious  that  Jimmy  knew  more  or  less 
everybody.  So,  without  waiting  for  an  answer,  she  went  on, 
"Well,  have  you  been  behind  the  scenes  there  since  the  thing 
began  ?" 

"No,  I've  not  gone  back,"  said  Jimmy.    "Why  should  I  ?" 

"You  haven't  even  been  curious/'  she  questioned,  "to  find 
out  what  a  girl  who  looked  and  talked  as  much  like  Eose  as 
that,  was  like  ?"  She  concluded,  for  good  measure,  with  one 
more  question  voiced  a  little  differently — more  casually. 
"Have  you  happened  to  see  Eodney  lately  ?" 

"Why,  yes,"  Jimmy  said  unwarily.  "'I  met  him  at  the  club 
the  other  day;  only  saw  him  for  a  minute  or  two.  We  had 
one  drink." 

"And  did  you  happen  to  tell  him,"  she  asked,  "about  this 
dressmaker  in  The  Girl  Up-stairs  who  looked  so  wonderfully 
like  Eose?  Did  you  offer  to  take  him  round  to  see  for  him 
self?" 

"I  tell  you  there's  nothing  to  that !"  said  John.  He'd  been 
caught  in  the  same  trap,  it  seemed.  "What's  the  use  of  but 
ting  in  ?  If  anything  has  gone  wrong  with  those  two  .  .  ." 

"You've  always  said  there  hasn't,"  Violet  interrupted. 

"And  you've  said,"  he  countered,  "that  you  were  sure  there 
had.  Well,  then,  if  there's  a  chance  of  it,  why  run  the  risk, 
just  for  nothing?" 

Jimmy,  as  it  happened,  had  never  heard  even  a  suggestion 
that  Eose  and  Eodney  were  on  any  other  terms  than  those  of 
perfect  amity.  He  hoped  they'd  go  on  and  tell  him  more.  So 
to  prevent  their  becoming  suddenly  discreet,  he  promptly 
changed  the  subject. 

"I  thought  you  had  a  taboo  against  the  Globe,"  he  said  to 
Violet.  "How  did  you  happen  to  go  there?" 

"John  went  while  I  was  in  New  York,"  she  explained. 


"Hon't   \itu   know   that  that   \va<    Rose   AUlrich  ?" 


THE   VOICE    OF   THE   WOULD  347 

"He's — well,  a  regular  fan,  you  know.  He  hasn't  missed  a 
show  there  in  years.  And  he  was  too  queer  and  absent-minded, 
and  fidgety  for  words,  when  I  came  back.  I  thought  a  bank 
must  be  going  to  fail,  or  Bomething.  And  when  he  said,  after 
dinner  last  night,  that  he  felt  like  going  to  a  musical  show, 
of  course  I  said  I'd  go  with  him.  And  when  I  found  it  was 
the  Globe — he  already  had  tickets — I  was  too — kind  and 
sorry  for  him  to  make  a  fuss.  Well,  and  then  she  came  out 
on  the  stage,  and  I  knew  what  it  was  all  about." 

"Where  did  you  sit?"  Jimmy  asked. 

"Fifth  row,"  said  John. 

Violet  hadn't  got  the  bearing  of  Jimmy's  question.  "Oh, 
you  couldn't  mistake  her,"  she  said,  "any  more  than  you  could 
in  this  room,  now." 

"Do  you  mean,"  John  asked,  "that  she  might  have  recog 
nized  us?" 

"They  can't,"  said  Violet,  "across  the  footlights, — can 
they  ?" 

Jimmy  nodded.  "In  a  little  theater  like  that,"  he  said, 
"anywhere  in  the  house.  But  it  seems  she  didn't  recognize 
you."" 

"Look  here !"  said  Violet.  "Don't  you  know,  in  your  own 
mind,  just  as  well  as  that  you're  standing  there,  that  that 
was  Eose  Aldrich?" 

Jimmy  dropped  down  into  a  big  chair.  "Well,"  he  said, 
"I'm  willing  to  accept  it  as  a  working  hypothesis." 

"Yon  men !"  said  Violet. 

Dinner  was  announced  just  then,  and  the  theme  had  to 
be  dismissed  until  at  last  they  were  left  alone  with  the  des 
sert. 

"What  breaks  me  all  up,"  Violet  burst  out,  abandoning  the 
pretense  of  picking  over  her  walnuts,  and  showing,  with  a  lit 
tle  outflung  gesture,  how  impatient  she  had  been  to  take  it 
up,  "what  breaks  me  all  up  is  how  this'll  hit  Frederica.  She 
just  adores  Eodney  and  she's  been  simply  wonderful  to  Eose 
— for  him,  of  course." 

Xeither  of  the  men  said  anything,  but  she  felt  a  little  stir 
of  protest  from  both  of  them  and  qualified  the  last  phrase. 


348  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"Oh,  she  liked  her  for  herself,  too.  We  all  did.  We  couldn't 
help  it.  But  you  haven't  any  idea,  either  of  you,  of  even  the 
beginning  of  what  Frederica  did  for  her — steered  her  just 
right,  and  pushed  her  just  enough,  and  all  the  while  seeming 
not  to  be  doing  a  thing.  Freddy's  such  a  peach  at  that !  And 
she's  been  so  big-hearted  about  it;  never  even  felt  jealous.  If 
it  had  been  me,  and  I'd  adored  a  brother  like  that,  and  he'd 
gone  off  and  fallen  in  love  with  a  girl  nobody  knew,  just  be 
cause  he  saw  her  in  a  wrestling-match  with  a  street-car  con 
ductor,  I'd  have  wanted,  whatever  I  might  have  done,  to — 
well,  show  her  up.  And  yet,  even  after  Rose  had  left  him, 
for  no  reason  at  all,  Freddy  .  .  ." 

"You're  just  guessing  at  all  that,  you  know,"  her  husband 
interrupted  quietly.  "You  don't  know  a  single  thing  about  it." 

"Well,  what  reason  could  Rose  have  for  leaving  him  ?"  she 
flashed  back..  "Hasn't  Rodney  been  perfectly  crazy  about  her 
ever  since  he  married  her  ?  Has  he  ever  seen  another  woman 
the  last  two  years?  Or  maybe  you  think  he's  been  coming 
home  drunk  and  beating  her  with  a  trunk-strap." 

But  John  stuck  to  his  guns.  "You  don't  even  know  she's 
left  him.  The  only  thing  you  do  know  is  that  Bella  Forrester 
met  Frederica  one  day,  about  a  week  before  Christmas,  in  the 
railway  station  at  Los  Angeles." 

"Well,  can  you  tell  me  any  other  reason,"  Violet  demanded, 
"why  Freddy  should  dash  off  alone  to  California,  right  in  the 
middle  of  the  holiday  rush,  without  saying  a  word  to  any 
body,  and  be  back  here  in  just  a  week;  and  not  tell  even  me 
what  she'd  been  doing,  or  where  she'd  been,  so  that  if  Bella 
hadn't  written  to  me,  I'd  never  have  known  about  it  at  all  ?  Is 
there  any  way  of  explaining  that,  except  by  supposing  that 
Rose  had  quarreled  with  Rodney  and  left  him  and  that  Freddy 
was  trying  to  get  her  to  come  back?" 

Neither  of  the  men  could  offer,  on  the  spur  of  the  moment, 
the  alternative  explanation  she  demanded.  Indeed  it  would 
have  taken  a  good  deal  of  ingenuity  to  construct  one.  It  was 
safer,  anyway,  just  to  go  on  looking  incredulous. 

There  was  silence  for  a  minute  or  two,  then  Violet  burst 
out  again.  "And  then,  after  all  Freddy  had  done,  for  Rose 


THE   VOICE   OF   THE    WORLD  349 

to  come  back  here  to  Chicago,  with  all  the  other  cities  in  the 
country  where  it  wouldn't  matter  what  she  did,  and  start  to 
be,  of  all  things,  a  chorus-girl!  It's  just  a" — she  hesitated 
over  the  word,  and  then  used  it  with  an  inflection  that  gave 
it  its  full  literal  meaning — "just  a  dirty  trick.  And  poor 
Freddy,  when  she  knows  .  .  . !" 

''I  don't  believe  a  word  of  it,"  said  John  Williamson.  "I 
don't  believe  Doris  Dane — if  that's  her  name — is  Eose,  in 
the  first  place.  And  I  don't  believe  Rose  has  had  a  quarrel 
with  Rodney.  But  if  she  has,  and  if  she's  really  there  in  that 
show  .  .  .  Well,  I  know  Rose — not  so  well  as  I'd  have 
liked  to,  but  pretty  well — and  I  know  she's  a  fine  girl  and  I 
know  she's  square.  And  if  I  ever  saw  a  girl  in  love  with  her 
husband,  she  was.  Well,  and  if  she  has  done  it,  she's  got  a 
reason  for  it.  Oh,  I  don't  mean  another  woman  or  a  trunk- 
strap,  or  any  of  the  regular  divorce  court  stuff.  That's  absurd, 
of  course.  And  it  may  be,  really,  a  fool  reason.  But  you  can 
bet  it  didn't  look  like  that  to  her.  She  wouldn't  have  done  it, 
admitting  it's  what  she's  done,  unless  she  felt  she  had  to." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Violet,  "I  expect  she's  feeling  awfully  noble 
about  it,  and  I'll  admit  she  was  in  love  with  Rodney.  And 
that  makes  it  all  the  worse !  If  she'd  fallen  in  love  with  some 
other  man  and  run  off  with  him — well,  that  isn't  pretty,  but 
it's  happened  before  and  people  have  got  away  with  it.  But 
this  running  away  on  account  of  some  silly  idea  that  she's 
picked  up  from  that  votes-for-women  mother  of  hers,  running 
away  from  a  man  like  Rodney,  too,  just  makes  you  sick." 

Her  husband  didn't  try  to  answer  her,  except  with  a  regret 
ful  sigh.  He  recognized  in  the  stinging  contempt  of  his  wife's 
words,  the  voice  of  their  world.  If  Doris  Dane  of  the  sextette 
were  really  Rose — and  in  the  bottom  of  his  heart,  despite  his 
valiant  pretense,  he  couldn't  manage  more  than  a  feeble  doubt 
of  it — she  had  committed  the  unforgivable  sin.  Or  so  he 
thought,  leaving  out  of  his  calculations  one  ingredient  in  the 
situation.  She  had  done  an  unconventional  thing  for  the  sake 
of  a  principle ! 

"Well,"  said  Jimmy  Wallace  after* a  while,  heading  the 
conversation  away,  as  he  was  wont  to  do,  from  what  might 


350  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

be  an  endless  discussion  of  moral  principles,  "the  purpose  of 
this  council  of  war  is  to  decide  what  we  are  going  to  do  about 
it.  Are  we  going  to  tell  Aldrich  or  his  sister  about  the  dress 
maker  who  looks  so  much  like  his  wife,  and  let  them  find 
out  for  themselves  whether  she  is  or  not?  Or  are  we  going 
to  make  sure  first  by  going  back  on  the  stage  there  and  having 
a  talk  with  her  ?  Or  are  we  just  going  to  shut  up  about  it — • 
never  have  been  to  the  Globe  at  all;  or,  in  my  case,  never  to 
have  noticed  the  resemblance?" 

"On  the  chance,  you  mean,"  John  inquired,  "that  Eodney 
and  Frederica  never  find  out  at  all?  How  much  does  that 
chance  amount  to?" 

"Well,"  said  Jimmy,  "the  show's  in  its  fourth  week,  and 
the  story  hasn't  got  into  the  papers  yet.  So  the  chances  are 
now  it  won't.  And  you're  about  the  only  person  in  your 
crowd  that  makes  a  practise  of  going  to  the  Globe.  If  you 
haven't  heard  any  rumors  it  probably  means  that  you  two  are 
the  only  ones  who  know,  so  far.  People  who  knew  her  before 
she  was  married  may  have  recognized  her,  to  be  sure,  but 
they  aren't  likely  to  go  around  either  to  Aldrich  or  to  Mrs. 
Whitney  with  the  story.  Of  course  there's  always  a  big  mar 
gin  for  the  unforeseeable.  But  even  at  that,  I  think  you 
might  call  it  an  even  chance." 

"That's  what  I  vote  for  then,"  said  John,  "shut  up." 

"I  certainly  don't  want  to  go  back  on  the  stage  and  talk 
to  Rose,"  said  Violet,  "and  I  simply  couldn't  make  myself 
tell  either  Rodney  or  Frederica.  It  would  be  just  too  ghastly ! 
But  there's  another  thing  you  haven't  thought  of.  Suppose 
they  both  know  already.  I've  got  an  idea  they  do." 

'  This  was  a  possibility  they  hadn't  thought  of,  but  the  more 
they  canvassed  it,  the  likelier  it  grew. 

"He  acts  as  if  he  knew,"  Violet  said,  "now  I  come  to  think 
of  it.  Oh,  I  can't  tell  exactly  why!  Just  the  way  he  talks 
about  her  and — doesn't  talk  about  her.  And  then  there's 
Harriet.  She  came  home  from  Washington  and  stayed  three 
days  with  Frederica  and  then  went  away  again.  She  kept 
house  for  him  while  Rose  was  laid  up,  and  why  shouldn't  she 
be  doing  it  now,  except  that  she's  perhaps  spoken  her  mind 


THE    VOICE    OF    THE    WORLD  351 

a  HtfTfe  too  freely  and  Eodney  doesn't  want  her  around? 
There'd  be  no  nonsense  about  Harriet,  you  could  count  on 
that" 

"It  wonld  be  like  Rose,"  said  John,  "to  tell  him  herself.  It 
wouldn't  be  like  her,  when  you  come  to  think  of  it,  to  do  any 
thing  else." 

"Oh,  yes,  she'd  tell  him,"  said  Violet.  "If  she  had  some 
virtuous  woman-suffrage  reason,  she'd  do  more  than  tell  him. 
She'd  rub  it  in.  Of  course  he  knows.  "Well,  what  shall  we  do 
about  that  ?" 

"Same  vote/'  said  John  Williamson;  "shut  up.  Certainly 
if  he  knows,  that  lets  us  out." 

But  Violet  wasn't  satisfied.  "That's  the  easiest  thing,  cer 
tainly,"  she  said,  "but  I  don't  believe  it's  right.  I  think  the 
people  who  know  him  best,  ought  to  know — just  a  few,  the 
people  he  still  drops  in  on,  like  the  Crawfords,  and  the  Wests, 
and  Eleanor  and  James  Randolph;  just  so  that  they  could 
— well,  not  know  completely  enough;  so  that  they  wouldn't, 
innocently,  you  know,  say  ghastly  things  to  him.  Or  even, 
perhaps,  do  them,  like  making  him  go  to  musical  shows,  or 
talking  about  people  who  run  away  to  go  on  the  stage.  There 
are  millions  of  things  like  that  that  could  happen,  and  if  they 
know,  they'll  be  careful." 

Her  husband  wasn't  very  completely  convinced,  though  she 
expounded  her  reasons  at  length,  and  urged  them  with  grow 
ing  intensity.  But  he'd  never  put  a  categorical  veto  upon  her 
yet,  and  it  wasn't  likely  he'd  begin  by  trying  to,  now. 

As  for  Jimmy  Wallace,  he  was  really  out  of  it.  But  he 
went  home  feeling  rather  blue. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT    AGAIN 

IT  was,  after  all,  out  of  that  limbo  that  Jimmy  had  spoken 
of  as  the  margin  of  the  unforeseeable,  that  the  blind  instru 
ment  of  Fate  appeared.  He  was  a  country  lawyer  from  down- 
state,  who,  for  a  client  of  his  own,  had  retained  Rodney  to 
defend  a  will  that  presented  complexities  in  the  matter  of 
perpetuities  and  contingent  remainders  utterly  beyond  his 
own  powers.  He'd  been  in  Chicago  three  or  four  days,  spend 
ing  an  hour  or  two  of  every  day  in  Rodney's  office  in  consul 
tation  with  him,  and,  for  the  rest  of  the  time,  dangling  about, 
more  or  less  at  a  loose  end.  A  belated  sense  of  this  struck 
Rodney  when,  at  the  end  of  their  last  consultation,  the  coun 
try  lawyer  shook  hands  with  him  and  announced  his  depar 
ture  -for  home  on  the  five  o'clock  train. 

"I'm  sorry  I  haven't  been  able  to  do  more,"  Rodney  said, — 
"do  anything  really,  in  the  way  of  showing  you  a  good  time. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  I've  spent  every  evening  this  week  here 
in  the  office." 

"Oh,  I  haven't  lacked  for  entertainment,"  the  man  said. 
"We  hayseeds  find  the  city  a  pretty  lively  place.  I  went  to 
see  a  show  just  last  night  called  The  Girl  Up-siairs.  I  sup 
pose  you've  seen  it." 

"No,"  said  Rodney,  "I  haven't," 

"Well,  the  title's  pretty  raw,  of  course,  but  the  show's  all 
right.  Nothing  objectionable  about  it,  and  it  was  downright 
funny.  I  haven't  laughed  so  hard  in  a  year.  Pretty  tunes, 
too.  I  tried  to-day  to  get  some  records  of  it  but  they  didn't 
have  any  yet.  If  you  want  a  real  good  time,  you  go  to  see  it." 

The  client  was  working  his  way  to  the  door  all  the  while 
and  Rodney  followed  him,  so  that  the  last  part  of  this  con- 

353 


THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT    AGAIN"  353 

versation  took  place  in  the  outer  office.  Rodney  saw  the  man 
off  with  a  final  hand-shake,  closed  the  door  after  him  and 
strolled  irresolutely  back  toward  Miss  Beach's  desk. 

It  was  true,  as  he  had  told  his  client,  that  he  had  been 
spending  most  of  his  evenings  lately  in  his  office,  and  it  was 
also  true  that  he  had  an  immense  amount  of  work  to  do ;  he'd 
been  taking  it  on  rather  recklessly  during  the  last  two  months. 
But  they'd  been  pretty  sterile,  those  long  solitary  evening 
hours.  He'd  worked  fitfully,  grinding  away  by  brute 
strength  for  a  while,  without  interest,  without  imagination, 
and  then,  in  a  frenzy  of  impatience,  thrusting  the  legal  rub 
bish  out  of  the  way  and  letting  the  enigma  of  his  great  fail 
ure  usurp,  once  more,  hie  mind  and  his  memories. 

It  had  occurred  to  him  to  wonder,  as  he  stood  listening  to 
his  client's  enthusiastic  description  of  the  show  at  the  Globe, 
whether  it  would  be  possible,  in  any  surroundings,  for  him, 
for  an  hour  or  two,  to  laugh  and  be  jolly — and.  forget.  It 
might  be  an  experiment  worth  trying! 

"Telephone  over  to  the  University  Club,"  he  said  suddenly 
to  Miss  Beach,  "and  see  if  you  can  get  me  a  seat  for  The  Girl 
Up-stairs." 

The  office  boy  was  out  on  an  errand  and  in  his  absence  the 
switchboard  was  Miss  Beach's  care. 

"The—  The   Girl    Up-stairs?"  she  repeated. 

"That's  what  he  said,  isn't  it  ?" 

"Yes,"  she  assented.    "That's— the  name  of  it." 

Pie  might  have  been  expected,  after  giving  an  order  like 
that,  to  go  striding  back  into  his  private  office  and  slam  the 
door  after  him.  It  wasn't  at  all  his  way  to  keep  a  lingering 
hand  on  a  task  after  he'd  delegated  it  to  some  one  else.  But 
he  didn't  on  this  occasion  act  as  she'd  expected  him  to;  re 
mained  abstractedly  where  he  was  while  something  turned 
itself  over  in  his  mind. 

There  was  nothing  urgent  about  his  order  of  course,  and 
it  was  natural  enough  that  she  should  go  on  with  her  typing 
to  the  end  of  a  sentence,  or  even  of  a  paragraph.  But  he  stayed 
on  and  on,  and  Miss  Beach  went  steadily  on  with  her  typing. 
Finally  he  roused  himself  enough  to  look  around  at  her. 


354  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"Go  ahead  and  telephone,"  he  said.  "I  want  to  find  out  if 
I  can  get  a  seat/' 

She  arose  o'bediently  and  moved  over  to  the  switchboard, 
then  began  fumbling  with  the  directory. 

"Good  lord !"  said  Rodney.  "You  know  the  number  of  the 
University  Club !" 

Of  course  it  was  true  she  did.  She  called  it  up  for  him 
on  an  average  of  a  dozen  times  a  week.  He  was  looking  at 
her  now  with  undisguised  curiosity.  She  was  acting,  for  a 
perfectly  infallible  machine  like  Miss  Beach,  almost  queer. 
But  she  acted  queerer  the  next  moment.  She  laid  down  the 
directory,  clasped  her  hands  tight  and  pressed  her  lips  to 
gether.  Then,  without  looking  around  at  him,  she  said: 

"You  don't  want  to  go  to  see  that  show,  Mr.  Aldrich.  It — 
it  isn't  good  at  all." 

Rodney  was  more  nearly  amused  than  he  had  been  in  a 
month. 

"You've  been  to  see  it?"  he  asked. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  and  managed  to  go  on  a  little  more  nat- 
uralty,  "Mr.  Craig  took  me.  We  had  a  bet  on  what  the  Su 
preme  Court's  decision  would  be  in  the  Roderick  case — the 
ater  tickets  against  two  pounds  of  home-made  fudge,  and  I 
won.  And — that's  where  we  went." 

"And  you  didn't  like  it,  eh?" 

"Xo,"  she  said. 

By  now  he  was  grinning  at  her  outright.  "Vulgar?"  he 
asked. 

Her  color  had  mounted  again.    "Yes,"  she  said. 

The  notion  of  having  his  dramatic  entertainment  censored 
by  a  frail,  prim  little  thing  like  Miss  Beach  tickled  his  burly 
sense  of  humor.  "It  would  be  a  horrible  thing  if  I  should 
go  to  see  anything  vulgar,  wouldn't  it?"  he  observed.  "But 
I  think  I'll  take  a  chance.  You  go  ahead  and  telephone." 

At  that  she  rose  and,  for  the  first  time,  faced  him.  To  his 
amazement,  he  saw  that  she  was  in  a  perfect  panic  of  embar 
rassment  and  fright.  But,  for  some  grotesque  reason,  she 
was  determined,  too.  She  was  blushing  up  to  the  hair  and 
her  lips  were  trembling. 


THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT   AGAIN  355 

"Mr.  Aldrich,"  she  said,  "'you  won't  like  that  show.  If — 
if  you  go,  you'll  be  sorry." 

While  he  was  still  staring  at  her,  young  Craig  came  burst 
ing  blithely  out  of  his  office,  a  bundle  of  papers  in  his  hand 
and  the  pucker  of  a  silent  whistle  still  on  his  lips.  "Oh,  Miss 
Beach !"  he  said,  and  then  stopped  short,  seeing  that  some 
thing  had  happened. 

Rodney  tried  an  experiment.  "Craig,"  he  said,  "Miss  Beach 
doesn't  want  me  to  buy  a  ticket  for  The  Girl  Up-stairs.  She 
says  I  won't  like  it.  Do  you  agree  with  her?" 

A  flare  of  red  came  up  into  the  boy's  face,  and  his  jaw 
dropped.  Then,  as  well  as  he  could,  he  pulled  himself  to 
gether.  "Yes,  sir,"  he  said,  swung  around  and  marched  back 
into  his  own  cubby-hole. 

"You  needn't  telephone,  Miss  Beach,"  said  Rodney  curtly. 
And  without  another  word  he  put  on  his  hat  and  overcoat 
and  left  the  office. 

It  was  not  a  very  profound  emotion  that  drove  him  along; 
a  violent  superficial  one,  rather,  like  the  gusty  wrath  which 
had  precipitated  the  last  phase  of  his  great  struggle  with 
Rose — the  time  he  told  her  he  wouldn't  jeopardize  the  chil 
dren's  lives  to  satisfy  her  whims.  He  was  furiously  impatient 
with  the  good  intentions  of  his  friends.  He  had  been  aware  of 
a  sort  of  unnatural  gentleness  about  them  ever  since  Christ 
mas  ;  but  either  it  had  intensified  during  the  last  ten  days,  or 
else  he  had  suddenly  got  more  sensitive  to  it.  The  latter, 
most  likely.  And  yet  Violet  Williamson's  manner  the  last 
Sunday  evening  he  had  spent  at  her  house,  had  stopped  just 
short  of  a  hushed  voice  and  tiptoes.  He'd  been  momentarily 
expecting  her  to  offer  him  an  egg-nog. 

But  this  paroxysm  of  tact  that  had  just  broken  out  in  his 
office  was  really  too  much.  Of  course  they'd  been  talking  him 
over,  those  two.  It  must  have  been  amply  obvious  to  them 
for  a  good  while  that  there  "was  something  more  than  met 
the  eye,  about  that  long  visit  of  his  wife's  to  California.  And 
it  was  nice  and  human  of  them  to  feel  sorry  for  him.  But 
that  they  should  decide,  because  The  Girl  Up-stairs  con 
tained  some  rather  coarsely  derisive  song,  perhaps,  about  men 


356  THE   REAL   ADVENTUKE 

whose  wives  run  away  from  them,  or  something  in  the  plot 
about  a  trip  to  California  with  a  less  honorable  purpose  than 
its  ostensible  one,  that  he  should  on  no  account  be  permitted 
to  see  the  show,  was  ridiculous.  He  walked  straight  over  to 
the  club  and  told  the  man  at  the  cigar  counter  to  get  him  a 
ticket  for  to-night's  performance. 

It  was  then  after  five  and  he  decided  not  to  go  back  to  the 
office  before  dinner.  In  fact,  he  might  as  well  dine  down 
here.  So  he  went  up  to  the  lounge,  armed  himself  with  an 
evening  paper  against  casual  acquaintances,  ordered  a  drink 
and  dropped  into  a  big  leather  chair. 

But  all  his  carefully  contrived  environment  hadn't  the 
power,  it  seemed,  to  shift  the  current  of  his  thoughts.  They 
went  on  dwelling  on  the  behavior  of  Miss  Beach  and  young 
Craig,  which  really  got  queerer  the  more  one  thought  about 
it.  It  was  hard  to  conceive  of  any  allusion  in  the  plot  or 
the  songs  of  a  silly  little  musical  comedy,  pointed  enough  to 
account  for  Miss  Beach's  frantically  determined  effort  to  keep 
him  away,  or  for  the  instantaneous  flush  that  had  leaped  into 
young  Craig's  face.  Because,  after  all,  they  didn't  actually 
know  that  his  great  adventure  had  come  to  grief,  and  what 
ever  either  of  them  might  have  thought  of  the  applicability 
of  something  that  was  said  on  the  stage,  to  their  employer's 
case,  it  wouldn't  have  been  a  bit  like  either  of  them  to  dis 
cuss  it  with  the  other.  In  the  absence  of  such  a  discussion, 
and  the  prevision  of  his  going  to  the  show,  you  couldn't  ac 
count  for  young  Craig's  having  caught  the  point  instantly 
like  that.  And  yet,  what  other  explanation  could  there  be? 
There  was  none,  and  there  was  an  end  of  it ! 

Only  it  wasn't  the  end  of  it.  The  straying  search-light  of 
his  memory  picked  up  a  moment  during  that  last  evening  at 
the  Williamsons'.  The  Crawfords  had  been  there,  and  some 
body  else — a  man  he  didn't  know;  and  the  stranger  had  said 
something,  a  harmless  stupid  remark  enough,  about  the  tired 
business  man  and  the  sort  of  musical-comedy  he  liked ;  where 
upon  both  Constance  and  Violet  had  made  a  sort  of  concerted 
swoop  and  changed  the  subject  almost  violently.  John  Wil 
liamson  made  a  practise  of  going  to  the  Globe,  he  knew,  but 


THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT   AGATtf  357 

that  John,  who  never  spotted  an  allusion  in  his  life,  should 
have  come  home  and  passed  the  word  along,  and  that  all  ref 
erences  to  musical-comedy  should  therefore  be  taboo  on  Rod 
ney's  account,  was  simply  fantastic. 

But  the  fantasticality  of  an  idea  seemed,  in  his  mood  to 
night,  merely  to  give  it  the  burr-like  quality  of  sticking  in 
his  mind,  holding  on  there  with  a  hundred  tiny  barbs,  despite 
his  endeavors  to  pluck  it  out.  It  even  occurred  to  him  that 
the  manner  of  the  man  at  the  cigar  counter — the  man  he  had 
just  told  to  get  him  a  ticket,  had  not  been  quite  natural ;  had 
been  a  little  exaggeratedly  matter-of-fact.  He  always  got  his 
seats  of  that  man,  and  the  man  always  made  some  little  en 
couraging  remark,  as,  for  example,  that  he'd  heard  it  was  a 
good  show;  or,  more  non-committally,  that  he  hoped  Mr.  Al- 
drich  would  enjoy  it.  To-night,  certainly,  he'd  said  nothing 
of  the  sort. 

The  absurdity  of  this  consideration  was  simply  intolerable. 
He  flung  down  his  paper  and  went  into  the  adjoining  room — 
a  room  full  of  tables  of  various  sizes,  and  thronged,  at  this 
hour,  with  members  getting  up  an  appetite  for  dinner  by  the 
shortest  route.  The  large  round  table  nearest  the  door  was 
preempted  by  a  group  of  men  he  knew;  some  of  them  well, 
some  only  casually,  and  he  came  up  with  the  intention  of 
dropping  into  the  one  vacant  chair.  But  just  before  the  first 
of  them  caught  a  glimpse  of  him,  his  ear  picked  up  the  phrase, 
"The  Girl  Up-stairs."  And  then  a  lawyer  named  Gaylord 
looked  up  and  recognized  him.  "Hello,  Aldrich,"  he  said,  and 
Rodney  would  have  sworn  that  the  flash  of  silence  that  fol 
lowed  had  a  galvanic  quality  that  wasn't  given  it  merely  by 
his  own  imagination.  The  others  began  greeting  him,  urging 
him  to  sit  down  and  have  a  drink. 

Rodney  pulled  in  a  long  breath :  "Didn't  I  hear  some  one 
talking  about  The  Girl  Up-stairs?"  he  asked.  "Is  it  a  good 
show?  Shall  I  go  to  see  it?" 

The  silence  was  even  briefer  this  time. 

Gaylord  spoke  through  what  would  pass  for  a  yawn.  "I 
don't  know,"  he  said.  "I  haven't  seen  it." 

One  or  two  of  the  others  shook  their  heads  blankly.   Finally 


358  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

somebody  else  said :  "Just  a  regular  Globe  show,  I  guess.  All 
right;  but  hardly  worth  bothering  about." 

Once  more  they  urged  him  to  sit  down  and  have  a  drink, 
but  he  said  he  was  looking  for  somebody  and  walked  away 
down  the  room  and  out  the  farther  door. 

He  knew  now  that  he  was  afraid.  Yet  the  thing  he  was 
afraid  of  refused  to  come  out  into  the  open,  where  he  could 
see  it  and  know  what  it  was.  He  still  believed  that  he  didn't 
know  what  it  was,  when  he  walked  past  the  framed  photo 
graphs  in  the  lobby  of  the  theater  without  looking  at  them 
and  stopped  at  the  box-office  to  exchange  his  seat,  well  down 
in  front,  for  one  near  the  back  of  the  theater. 

But  when  the  sextette  made  their  first  entrance  upon  the 
stage,  he  knew  that  he  had  known  for  a  good  many  hours. 

He  never  stirred  from  his  seat  during  either  of  the  inter 
missions.  But  along  in  the  third  act,  he  got  up  and  went  out. 

I  doubt  if  ever  a  troglodytic  ancestor  of  his  had  been  as 
angry  as  Eodney  was  at  that  moment.  Because,  long  before 
the  pressure  of  the  troglodyte's  anger  had  mounted  to  the 
pressure  of  Eodney's,  it  would  have  relieved  itself  in  action. 
He'd  have  descended  on  the  scene,  beating  down  any  of  the 
onlookers  who  might  be  fools  enough  to  try  to  oppose  his  pur 
pose,  seized  his  woman  and  carried  her  off  to  his  cave.  Which 
is  precisely  and  literally  what  Eodney,  with  every  aching  fila 
ment  of  nerve  tissue  in  his  body,  most  passionately  wanted 
to  do. 

The  knout  that  flogged  his  soul  had  a  score  of  lashes,  each 
with  the  sting  of  its  own  peculiar  venom.  Everybody  who 
knew  him,  his  closer  friends,  and  his  casual  acquaintances  as 
well,  must  have  known,  for  weeks,  of  this  disgrace.  His 
friends  had  been  sorry  for  him,  with  just  a  grain  of  con 
tempt;  his  acquaintances  had  grinned  over  it  with  just  a 
pleasurable  salt  of  pity.  "Do  you  know  Aldrich?  Well,  his 
wife's  in  the  chorus  at  the  Globe  Theater.  And  he  doesn't 
know  it,  poor  devil."  That  group  at  the  round  table  at  the 
club  to-night.  He  could  fancy  their  faces  after  he'd  turned 
away. 

Oh,  but  what  did  they  matter  after  all  ?  What  did  any  of 


THE    STTORT    CIRCUIT   AGAIN  359 

them  matter?  What  did  anything  matter  in  the  world,  ex 
cept  that  the  woman  he'd  so  whole-heartedly  and  utterly  loved 
and  lived  for — the  woman  who'd  left  him  with  those  protes 
tations  of  the  need  of  his  friendship  and  respect,  was  there 
on  that  stage  disporting  herself  for  hire — and  cheap  hire  at 
that,  before  this  fatuous  mass  of  humanity  packed  in  all 
about  him.  They  were  staring  at  her,  as  the  money  they'd 
paid  for  admission  entitled  them  to  stare,  licking  their  lips 
over  her. 

He  hadn't  had  a  moment's  uncertainty  that  it  was  indeed 
she.  Couldn't  shelter  himself,  even  for  an  instant,  behind 
Jimmy  Wallace's  theory  of  an  "amazing  resemblance." 

The  others  of  their  world  had  always  known  Rose  as  a  per 
son  with  a  good  deal  of  natural  and  quite  unconscious  dignity. 
She  had  never  romped  nor  larked  before  any  of  them,  and 
she  conveyed  the  impression,  not  of  refraining  as  a  conces 
sion  to  good  manners,  but  simply  of  being  the  sort  of  person 
who  didn't,  naturally,  express  herself  in  those  -ways.  But  in 
the  interior  privacies  of  their  life  together,  she'd  often  shown 
herself,  for  him,  a  different  Rose.  She'd  played  with  him 
with  the  abandon  of  a  young  kitten — romped  and  wrestled 
with  him.  And  there'd  been  a  deliciousness  about  this  phase 
of  her,  which  resided,  for  him,  in  the  fact  that  it  was  kept 
for  him  alone. 

But  now,  here  on  the  stage  of  a  cheap  theater,  she  was 
parading  that  exquisite  thing  before  the  world !  Along  in 
the  second  act,  where  Sylvia's  six  friends  come  to  spend  the 
night  with  her  and  sleep  out  on  the  roof,  there  was  a  mad 
lark  which  brought  up  maddening  memories.  He  felt  that 
he  must  get  his  hands  on  her — shake  her — beat  her ! 

Yet,  all  the  while,  if  any  of  his  neighbors  thought  of  him 
at  all — became  aware  of  him  and  wondered  at  him,  it  was 
only  because  he  sat  so  still.  And  when  the  thing  had  become, 
at  last,  utterly  unbearable,  and  he  got  up  to  go  out,  he  man 
aged  to  look  at  his  watch  first,  quite  in  the  manner  of  a 
"commuter"  with  anxieties  about  the  ten-fifty-five  train. 

The  northwest  wind,  which  had  been  blowing  icily  since 
sundown,  had  increased  in  violence  to  a  gale.  But  he  strode 


360  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

out  of  the  lobby  and  into  the  street,  unaware  of  it.  There 
must  be  a  stage  door  somewhere,  he  knew,  and  he  meant  to 
find  it.  It  didn't  occur  to  him  to  inquire.  He'd  quite  lost 
his  sense  of  social  being ;  of  membership  in  a  civilized  society. 
He  was  another  Ishmael. 

It  took  him  a  long  time  to  find  that  door,  for,  as  it  hap 
pened,  he  started  around  the  block  in  the  wrong  direction  and 
fruitlessly  explored  two  alleys  before  he  came  on  the  right 
one.  But  he  found  it  at  last  and  pulled  the  door  open.  An 
intermittent  roar  of  hand-clapping,  increasing  and  diminish 
ing  with  the  rapid  rise  and  fall  of  the  curtain,  told  him  that 
the  performance  was  just  over. 

A  doorman  stopped  him  and  asked  him  what  he  wanted. 

"I  want  to  see  Mrs.  Aldrich,"  he  said,  "Mrs.  Rodney  Al- 
drich." 

"No  such  person  here,"  said  the  man,  and  Rodney,  in  his 
rage,  simply  assumed  that  he  was  lying.  It  didn't  occur  to 
him  that  Rose  would  have  taken  another  name. 

He  stood  there  a  moment  debating  whether  to  attempt  to 
force  an  entrance  against  the  doorman's  unmistakable  in 
tention  to  stop  him,  and  decided  to  wait  instead. 

The  decision  wasn't  due  to  common  sense,  but  to  a  wish 
not  to  dissipate  his  rage  on  people  that  didn't  matter.  He 
wanted  it  intact  for  Rose. 

He  went  back  into  the  alley,  braced  himself  in  the  angle  of 
a  brick  pier  and  waited.  He  neither  stamped  his  feet  nor 
flailed  his  arms  about  to  drive  off  the  cold.  He  just  stood 
still  with  the  patience  of  his  immemorial  ancestor,  waiting. 
Unconscious  of  the  lapse  of  time,  unconscious  of  the  figures 
that  presently  began  straggling  out  of  the  narrow  door,  that 
were  not  she. 

Presently  she  came.  A  buffet  of  wind  struck  her  as  she 
closed  the  door  behind  her,  and  whipped  her  unbuttoned  ul 
ster  about,  but  she  did  not  cower  under  it,  nor  turn  away — 
stood  there  finely  erect,  confronting  it.  There  was  something 
alert  about  her  pose — he  couldn't  clearly  see  her  face — that 
suggested  she  was  expecting  somebody.  And  then,  not  loud, 
but  very  distinctly: 


THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT    AGA1X  361 

"Roddy,"  she  said. 

He  tried  to  speak  her  name,  but  his  dry  throat  denied  it 
utterance.  He  began  suddenly  to  tremble.  He  came  forward 
out  of  the  shadow  and  she  saw  him  and  came  to  meet  him, 
and  spoke  his  name  again. 

"I  saw  you  when  you  went  out,"  she  said.  "I  was  afraid 
you  mightn't  wait.  I  hurried  as  fast  as  I  could.  I've — 
w-waited  so  long.  Longer  than  you." 

They  were  so  near  together  now,  that  she  became  aware 
how  he  was  trembling — shuddering  fairly. 

"You're  c-cold,"  she  said. 

He  managed  at  last  to  speak,  and  as  he  did  so,  reached  out 
and  took  her  by  the  shoulders.  "Come  home,"  he  said.  "You 
must  come  home." 

At  that  she  stepped  back  and  shook  her  head.  But  he  had 
discovered  while  his  hands  held  her,  that  she  was  trembling, 
too. 

The  stage  door  opened  again  to  emit  a  group  of  three  of 
the  ponies. 

"My  Gawd,"  one  of  them  shrilled,  "what  a  hell  of  a  night !" 

They  stared  curiously  at  Dane  and  the  big  man  who  stood 
there  with  her,  then  scurried  away  down  the  alley. 

"We  can't  talk  here,"  he  said.    "We  must  go  somewhere." 

She  nodded  assent  and  they  moved  off  side  by  side  after  the 
three  little  girls,  but  slower.  In  an  accumulation  of  shad 
ows,  half-way  down  the  alley,  he  reached  out  for  her  arm. 
It  might  have  begun  as  an  automatic  act — just  an  uncon 
scious  instinct  to  prevent  her  stumbling,  there  in  the  dark. 
But  the  moment  he  touched  her,  the  quality  of  it  changed. 
He  gripped  her  arm  tight  and  they  both  stood  still.  The  next 
moment,  and  without  a  word,  they  moved  on  again.  At  the 
corner  of  the  alley,  they  turned  north.  This  was  on  Clark 
Street.  Finally : 

"Are  you  all  right,  Roddy?  And  the  babies?"  she  man 
aged  to  say.  "It's  a  good  many  days  since  I've  heard  from 
Portia."  And  then,  suddenly,  "Was  it  because  anything  had 
gone  wrong  that  you  came?" 

"I  didn't  know  you  were  here  until  I  saw  you  on  the  stage." 


362  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

This  was  all,  in  words,  that  passed  until  they  reached  the 
bridge.  But  there  needed  no  words  to  draw  up,  tighter  and 
tighter  between  them,  a  singing  wire  of  memories  and  asso 
ciations;  there  was  no  need,  even,  of  a  prolonged  contact  be 
tween  their  bodies.  He  had  let  go  her  arm  when  they  came 
out  of  the  alley,  and  they  walked  the  half-mile  to  the  bridge 
side  by  side  and  in  step,  and  except  for  an  occasional  brush 
of  her  shoulder  against  his  arm,  without  touching. 

But  the  Clark  Street  bridge,  with  a  February  gale  blowing 
from  the  west  down  the  straight  reach  of  the  river,  is  not  to 
be  negotiated  lightly.  Strong  as  they  were,  the  force  of  the 
wind  actually  stopped  them  at  the  edge  of  the  draw,  caught 
Eose  a  little  off  her  balance,  turned  her  half  around  and 
pressed  her  up  against  him. 

She  made  an  odd  noise  in  her  throat,  a  gasp  that  had 
something  of  a  sob  in  it,  and  something  of  a  laugh. 

For  a  moment — so  vivid  was  the  blaze  of  memory — he 
seemed  veritably  to  be  standing  on  another  bridge  (over  the 
north  branch  of  the  Drainage  Canal,  of  all  places)  with  the 
last,  leonine  blizzard  of  a  March,  which  had  been  treacher 
ously  lamblike  before,  swirling  drunkenly  about.  He  had 
been  tramping  for  hours  over  the  clay-rutted  roads  with  a 
girl  he  had  known  a  fortnight  and  had  asked,  the  day  be 
fore,  to  marry  him.  They  had  been  discussing  this  project 
very  sensibly,  they'd  have  said,  in  the  light  of  pure  reason; 
and  they  were  both  unconscionably  proud  of  the  fact  that  since 
the  walk  began  there  had  been  nothing  a  bystander  could 
have  called  a  caress  or  an  endearment  between  them.  But 
there  on  the  bridge,  a  buffet  of  the  gale  had  unbalanced  her, 
and  she — with  just  that  little  gasping  laugh — had  clutched 
at  his  shoulder.  He  had  flung  one  arm  around  her  and  then 
the  other.  Without  struggling  at  all  she  had  held  herself 
away  for  a  moment,  taut  as  a  strung  bow,  her  hands  clutch 
ing  his  shoulders,  her  forearms  braced  against  his  chest; 
then,  with  the  rapturous  relaxation  of  surrender,  her  body 
went  soft  in  his  embrace  and  her  arms  slid  round  his  neck; 
their  faces,  cool  with  the  fine  sleety  sting  of  the  snow,  came 
together. 


THE    SHOUT    CIRCUIT   AGATX  3G3 

The  vision  passed.  The  wind  was  colder  to-night  than  that 
March  blizzard  had  been,  and  the  dry  groan  of  a  passing  elec 
tric  car  came  mingled  with  the  whine  of  it.  Muffled  pedes 
trians,  bent  doggedly  down  against  it,  jostled  them  as  they 
went  by. 

He  steadied  her  with  a  hand  upon  her  shoulder,  slipped 
round  to  the  windward  side,  and  linked  his  arm  within  hers. 
But  it  was  a  moment  before  they  started  on  again.  Their 
hands  touched  and,  electricall}',  clasped.  Like  his,  hers  were 
ungloved.  She'd  had  them  in  her  ulster  pockets. 

"Do  you  remember  the  other  bridge  ?"  he  asked. 

Her  answer  was  to  press,  suddenly — fiercely — the  hand 
she  held  up  against  her  breast.  Even  through  the  thickness 
of  the  ulster,  he  could  feel  her  heart  beat.  They  crossed  the 
bridge,  but  the  hand-clasp  did  not  slacken  when  they  reached 
the  other  side.  Their  pace  quickened,  but  neither  of  them 
was  conscious  of  it. 

As  for  Rodney,  he  was  not  even  conscious  what  street  they 
were  walking  on,  nor  how  far  they  went.  He  had  no  destina 
tion  consciously  in  mind  or  any  avowed  plan  or  hope  for  what 
should  happen  when  they  reached  it.  Yet  he  walked  purpose 
fully  and,  little  by  little,  faster.  He  looked  about  him  in  a 
sort  of  dazed  bewilderment  when  she  disengaged  her  hand 
and  stopped,  at  last,  at  the  corner  of  the  delicatessen  shop, 
beside  the  entrance  to  her  little  tunnel. 

"Here's  where  I  live,"  she  said. 

"Where  you  live!"  he  echoed  blankly. 

"Ever  since  I  went  away — to  California.  I've  been  right 
here — where  I  could  almost  see  the  smoke  of  your  chimneys. 
I've  a  queer  little  room — I  only  pay  three  dollars  a  week  for 
it — but — it's  big  enough  to  be  alone  in." 

"Eose    .     .     ."  he  said  hoarsely. 

A  drunken  man  came  lurching  pitiably  down  the  street. 
She  shrank  into  the  dark  mouth  of  the  passage  and  Kodney 
followed  her,  found  her  with  his  hands,  and  heard  her  voice, 
speaking  breathlessly,  in  gasps.  He  hardly  knew  what  she 
was  saving. 


364  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

"It's  been  wonderful  ...  I  know  we  haven't  talked; 
we'll  do  that  some  other  time,  somewhere  where  we  can 
.  .  .  But  to-night,  walking  along  like  that,  just  as  ... 
To-morrow,  I  shall  think  it  was  all  a  dream." 

"Rose     .     .     ." 

"Wh-what  is  it?"  she  prompted,  at  last. 

"Let  me  in,"  he  said.  "Don't  turn  me  away  to-night !  I 
—I  can't  ..." 

The  only  sound  that  came  in  answer  was  a  long  tremulously 
indrawn  breath.  But  presently  her  hand  took  the  one  of  his 
that  had  been  clutching  her  shoulder  and  led  him  toward  the 
end  of  the  passage,  where  a  faint  light  through  a  transom 
showed  a  door.  She  opened  the  door  with  a  latch-key,  and 
then,  behind  her,  he  made  his  way  up  two  flights  of  narrow 
stairs,  whose  faint  creak  made  all  the  sound  there  was.  In  the 
black  little  corridor  at  the  top  she  unlocked  another  door. 

"Wait  till  I  light  the  gas,"  she  breathed. 

There  was  nothing  furtive  about  their  silence;  it  was  the 
wonder,  the  magic  of  being  together  again,  that  made  them 
steal  forward  like  awed  children. 

Into  an  ugly,  dingy,  cramped,  cold  little  room,  with  a 
rickety  dresser  and  a  lumpy  bed  and  a  grimy  window,  rattling 
fiercely  in  the  gusts  of  wind  that  went  whipping  down  the 
street  .  .  .  Into  a  palace  of  enchantment. 

She  left  the  gas  turned  low,  took  off  her  hat  and  ulster, 
pulled  down  the  blind  over  the  window  and  shut  the  door, 
hung  up  a  garment  that  had  been  left  flung  over  her  trunk  and 
dumped  a  bundle  of  laundry  that  had  not  been  put  away,  into 
a  bureau  drawer.  All  the  time  he'd  been  watching  her  hun 
grily,  without  a  word. 

She  turned  and  looked  into  his  face,  her  eyes  searching  it 
as  his  were  searching  hers,  luminously  and  with  a  swiftly 
kindling  fire.  Her  lips  parted  a  little,  trembling.  There  was 
a  sort  of  bloom  on  her  skin  that  became  more  visible  as  the 
blood,  wave  on  wave,  came  flushing  in  behind  it.  His  vision 
of  her  swam  suddenly  away  in  a  blur  as  his  own  eyes  filled 
up  with  tears. 

And  then,  with  that  little  sob  in  her  throat,  she  came  to 


THE    SHORT    CIRCUIT    AGAIN  365 

him.  "Oh,  Roddy  .  .  .  Roddy !"  was  all  she  said.  With 
her  own  lithe  arms  she  strained  his  embrace  the  tighter. 

So  far  as  the  superstructures  of  their  two  lives  were  con 
cerned, — the  part  of  them  that  floated  above  the  level  of  con 
sciousness,  the  whole  fabric  of  their  thoughts  and  theories 
and  ideals,  that  made  them  to  their  friends  and  to  each  other, 
and  very  largely  to  themselves,  Rose  and  Rodney, — they  were 
as  far  apart  as  on  the  day  she  had  left  his  house.  There  hadn't 
been,  since  then,  a  word  between  them  of  argument  or  com 
promise.  The  great  impasse  was  still  unforced.  lie  hadn't, 
as  yet,  shown  that  he  could  give  her  the  friendship  she  de 
manded.  She'd  had  no  chance  to  tell  him  of  any  of  the  small 
triumphs  and  disciplines  of  her  new  life  that  she  hoped  would 
win  it  from  him. 

And  as  for  Rodney,  he  was  the  same  man  who,  an  hour  ago, 
in  the  theater,  had  raged  and  writhed  under  what  he  felt  to 
be  an  invasion  of  his  proprietary  rights  in  her. 

He  wouldn't  have  defined  it  that  way,  to  be  sure,  in  a  talk 
with  Barry  Lake.  Would  have  denied,  indeed,  with  the  best 
of  them,  that  a  husband  had  any  proprietary  rights  in  his 
wife.  But  the  intolerable  sense  of  having  become  an  object  of 
derision,  or  contemptuous  pity,  of  being  disgraced  and  of  her 
being  degraded,  through  the  appearance  on  the  stage  of  a 
public  theater,  of  a  woman  who  was  his  wife;  and  through 
her  exhibition,  for  pay,  of  charms  he  had  always  supposed 
would  be  kept  for  him,  couldn't  derive  from  anything  else  but 
just  that.  He'd  waited  there  in  the  alley,  full  of  bitter 
thoughts  that  were  ready  to  leap  forth  in  denunciations. 
He'd  waited  there,  ready,  he  thought,  to  use  actual  physical 
force  on  her,  in  the  unthinkable  event  of  its  becoming  neces 
sary,  to  drag  her  out  of  this  pit  where  he  had  found  her,  back 
to  his  side  again. 

But  somehow,  when  he  had  heard  her  speak  his  name,  he'd 
begun  to  tremble.  And  when  he  had  felt  her  trembling,  too, 
the  bitter  phrases  had  died  on  his  tongue  and  the  thoughts 
that  propelled  them  were  smothered  like  fire  under  sand. 
And  as  he'd  stood  confronting  her  in  her  mean  little  room, 
his  eyes  searching  her  face,  all  he  had  been  looking  for  was  a 


366  THE    EEAL    ADYEXTUKE 

sign  of  the  hunger — the  ages-old  hunger — that  was  devouring 
him.  And  when  he'd  found  it,  that  was  enough  for  him. 
The  great  issue  that  was  to  be  fought  out  between  them  re 
mained  intact,  but  the  hunger  had  to  be  satisfied  first. 

It  was  hours  later,  in  the  very  dead  of  the  night,  as  he  sat 
on  the  edge  of  the  bed,  with  his  back  to  her,  that  the  old  sense 
of  outrage  and  degradation,  almost  as  suddenly  as  it  had  left 
him,  came  back.  And  came  back  in  a  way  that  made  it  more 
intolerable  than  ever.  For  the  clear  flame  of  it  had  lost  its 
clarity ;  the  confidence  that  had  fanned  it  was  gone — the  sense 
of  his  own  Tightness.  The  irresistible  surge  of  passion  that 
had  carried  him  off,  had  destroyed  that.  The  flame  smoked 
and  smoldered. 

"Have  you  anything  here,"  he  asked  her  dully,  "besides 
what  will  go  in  your  trunk  ?" 

It  was  the  surliness  of  his  tone,  rather  than  the  words 
themselves,  that  startled  her. 

"Xo,"  she  said  puzzled.    "Of  course  not." 

"Then  let's  throw  them  into  it  quickly,"  he  said,  "and  we'll 
lock  the  thing  up.  Do  you  owe  any  rent  ?" 

"Boddy!"  she  said.  He  heard  her  moving  behind  him. 
She  struck  a  match  and  lighted  the  gas.  Then  came  around 
in  front  of  him  and  stared  at  him  in  frowning  incredulity. 
"What  do  you  mean  ?" 

"I  mean  we're  going  to  get  out  of  this  abominable  place 
now — to-night.  "We're  going  home.  We  can  leave  an  address 
for  the  trunk.  If  it  never  comes,  so  much  the  better." 

Again  all  she  could  do  was  to  ask  him,  with  a  bewildered 
stammer,  what  he  meant.  "Because,"  she  added,  "I  can't  go 
home  yet.  I've — only  started." 

"'Started !"  he  echoed.  "Do  you  think  I'm  going  to  let  this 
beastly  farce  go  any  further  ?" 

And  with  that  the  smoldering  fire  licked  up  into  flame 
again.  He  told  her  what  had  happened  in  his  office  this  after 
noon;  told  her  of  the  attitude  of  his  friends,  how  they'd  all 
known  about  it — undoubtedly  had  come  to  see  for  themselves, 
and,  out  of  pity  or  contempt,  hadn't  told  him.  He  told  her 
how  he'd  felt,  sitting  there  in  the  theater;  why  he'd  waited  at 


THE    SHOET    CIRCUIT   AGAIN  367 

the  stage  door  for  her.  He  accused  her,  as  with  its  self-engen 
dered  heat  his  wrath  burned  brighter,  of  having  selected  the 
thing  to  do  that  would  hurt  him  worst,  of  having  borne  a 
grudge  against  him  and  avenged  it. 

It  was  the  ignoblest  moment  of  his  life,  and  he  knew  it. 
The  accusations  he  was  making  against  her  were  nothing  to 
those  that  were  storing  up  in  his  mind  against  himself.  The 
sense  of  Tightness  that  would  have  made  him  gentle,  had  been 
carried  away  by  the  passion  he'd  shared  with  her,  and  he 
couldn't  get  it  back. 

He  didn't  look  at  her  as  he  talked,  and  she  didn't  interrupt ; 
said  no  word  of  denial  or  defense.  The  big  outburst  spent 
itself.  He  lapsed  into  an  uneasy  silence,  got  himself  together 
again,  and  went  on  trying  to  restate  his  grievance — this  time 
more  reasonably,  retracting  a  little.  But  under  her  continued 
silence,  he  grew  weakly  irritated  again. 

When  at  last  she  spoke,  he  turned  his  eyes  toward  her  and 
saw  a  sort  of  frozen  look  in  her  dull  white  face  that  he  had 
never  seen  in  it  before.  Her  intonation  was  monotonous,  her 
voice  scarcely  audible. 

"I  guess  I  understand,"  she  said.  "I  don't  know  whether  I 
wish  I  was  dead  or  not.  If  I'd  died  when  the  babies  were 
born  .  .  .  But  I'm  glad  I  came  away  when  I  did.  And 
I'm  glad," — she  gave  a  faint  shudder  there  at  the  alternative 
• — "I'm  glad  I've  got  a  job  and  that  I  can  pay  back  that  hun 
dred  dollars  I  owe  you.  I've  had  it  quite  a  while.  But  I've 
kept  it,  hoping  you  might  find  out  where  I  was  and  come  to 
me,  as  you  did,  and  that  we  might  have  a  chance  to  talk.  I 
thought  I'd  tell  you  how  I'd  earned  it,  and  that  you'd  be  a 
little — proud  with  me  about  it,  proud  that  I  could  pay  it  back 
so  soon." 

She  smiled  a  little  over  that,  a  smile  he  had  to  turn  away 
from.  But  this  tortured  smile  shriveled  in  the  flame  of  pas 
sion  with  which  she  went  on.  "If  I  couldn't  pay  it  back  to 
night,  after  this,  I'd  feel  like  killing  myself,  or  like — going 
out  and  earning  it  in  the  streets.  Because  that's  what  you've 
made  me  to-night!" 

He  cried  out  her  name  at  that,  but  she  went  on  as  if  she 


368  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

hadn't  heard ;  only  calm  again — or  so  one  might  have  thought 
from  the  sound  of  her  voice. 

"I  went  away,  you  see,  because  I  couldn't  bear  to  have  the 
love  part  of  your  life  without  a  sort  of  friendly  partnership  in 
the  rest  of  it.  But  I  didn't  know  then  that  you  could  love  me 
while  you  hated  me,  while  you  felt  that  I'd  unspeakably  de 
graded  myself  and  disgraced  you.  So  that  while  you  loved 
me  and  had  me  in  your  arms,  you  felt  degraded  for  doing  it. 
I  didn't  know  that  till  now. 

"I  suppose  I'll  be  glad  some  day  that  it  all  happened ;  that 
I  met  you  and  loved  you  and  had  the  babies,  even  though  it's 
all  had  to  end,"  she  shuddered  again,  "like  this." 

It  wasn't  till  he  tried  to  speak  that  her  apparent  calm  was 
broken.  Then,  with  a  sudden  frantic  terror  in  her  eyes,  she 
begged  him  not  to — begged  him  to  go  away,  if  he  had  any 
mercy  for  her  at  all,  quickly  and'without  a  word.  In  a  sort 
of  daze  he  obeyed  her. 

The  tardy  winter  morning,  looking  through  her  grimy  win 
dow,  found  her  sitting  there,  huddled  in  a  big  bath-robe,  just 
as  she'd  been  when  he  closed  the  door. 


CHAPTER  XII 
"I'M  ALL  ALONE" 

THE  same  grizzly  dawn  that  looked  in  on  Rose  through  the 
dim  window  of  her  room  on  Clark  Street,  saw  Rodney  letting 
himself  in  his  own  front  door  with  a  latch-key  after  hours  of 
aimless  tramping  through  deserted,  unrecognized  streets.  He 
was  in  a  welter  of  emotions  he  could  no  more  have  given 
names  to  than  to  the  streets  whose  dreary  lengths  he  had 
plodded. 

The  one  thing  that  isolated  itself  from  the  rest,  climbed  up 
into  his  mind  and  there  kept  goading  him  into  a  weak  help 
less  fury,  was  a  jingling  tune  and  a  set  of  silly  words  that 
Rose  and  her  sisters  in  the  sextette  had  sung  the  night  before : 
"You're  all  alone,  I'm  all  alone;  come  on,  let's  be  lonesome 
together."  And  then  a  line  he  couldn't  remember  exactly, 
containing,  for  the  sake  of  the  rhyme,  some  total  irrelevancy 
about  the  weather,  and  a  sickening  bit  of  false  rhyming  to  end 
up  with,  about  loving  forever  and  ever.  The  jingle  of  that 
tune  had  kept  time  to  his  steps,  and  the  silly  words  had  sung 
themselves  over  and  over  endlessly  in  his  brain  until  the 
mockery  of  it  had  become  absolutely  excruciating.  Except  for 
that  damnable  tune,  there  was  nothing  in  his  mind  at  all. 
Everything  else  was  synthesized  into  a  dull  ache,  a  hollow, 
gnawing,  physical  ache.  But  he'd  endure  that,  he  thought,  if 
he  could  get  rid  of  the  diabolical  malice  of  that  tune.  Per 
haps  if  he  stopped  walking  and  just  sat  still  it  would  go  away. 

That's  why  he  went  home,  let  himself  in  with  his  latch-key 
and  made  his  way  furtively  to  the  library,  where  the  embers 
of  last  night's  fire  were  still  warm.  He  had  an  hour  at  least 
before  the  servants  would  be  stirring.  He  was  terribly  cold 
and  pretty  well  exhausted,  and  the  comfort  of  his  big  chair 
and  the  glow  of  the  fire  carried  him  off  irresistibly  into  a 
doze — a  doze  that  was  troubled  by  fantastic  dreams. 

369 


370  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

With  the  first  early  morning  stirrings  in  the  house,  the 
sounds  of  opening  doors  here  and  there,  the  penetrating  cry 
of  one  of  the  babies — muffled,  to  be  sure,  and  a  long  way  off, 
but  still  audible — he  came  broad  awake  again,  but  sat  for  a 
while  staring  about  the  room ;  at  the  wonderful  ornate  perfec 
tion  of  the  Italian  marble  chimney-piece  that  framed  the 
dying  fire;  at  the  tall  carved  chairs,  the  simple  grandeur  of 
the  three-hundred-year-old  table  and  the  subdued  richness,  in 
the  half  light,  of  the  tapestries  that  hung  on  the  walls. 

It  was  Florence  McCrae's  masterpiece,  this  room.  "But  this 
morning  its  perfections  mocked  him  with  the  ferocious  irony 
of  the  contrast  they  presented  to  that  other  room— that  un 
speakably  horrible  room  where  he  had  left  Eose.  Details  of 
its  hideousness,  that  he  hadn't  been  conscious  of  observing 
during  the  hours  he  had  spent  in  it,  came  back  to  him,  bitten 
out  with  acid  clearness; — the  varnished  top  of  the  bureau 
mottled  with  water  stains,  the  worn  splintered  floor,  the  horri 
ble  hard  blue  of  the  iron  bed,  the  florid  pattern  on  the  hand- 
painted  slop-jar. 

And  that  abominable  room  was  where  Eose  was  now !  She 
was  sitting,  perhaps,  just  as  he'd  left  her,  with  that  look  of 
frozen,  dumb  agony  still  in  her  face,  while  he  sat  here.  .  .  . 

He  sprang  up  in  a  sort  of  frenzy.  The  parlor  maid  would 
be  in  here  any  minute  now,  on  her  morning  rounds,  and  would 
wish  him  a  respectful  good  morning,  and  ask  him  what  he 
wanted  for  breakfast.  And  then,  with  automatic  perfection, 
would  appear  his  coffee,  his  grapefruit,  and  the  rest  of  it — all 
exactly  right,  the  result  of  a  perfect  precalculation  of  his 
wishes.  While  Eose  .  .  . 

He  put  on  his  outdoor  things  and  left  the  house,  motivated 
now,  for  the  first  time  in  many  hours,  with  a  clear  purpose. 
He'd  go  back  to  that  room  and  get  Eose  out  of  it.  He  was 
incapable  of  planning  how  it  should  be  done,  but  somehow — 
anyhow,  it  should  be ;  that  was  all  he  knew ! 

But  this  purpose  was  frustrated  the  moment  he  reached 
Clark  Street,  by  the  realization  that  he  hadn't  an  idea  within 
half  a  mile  at  least,  where  the  room  was.  Neither  when  he 
went  into  it  with  Eose,  nor  when  he  left  it,  had  he  picked  up 


"I'M   ALL   ALONE"  371 

any  sort  of  landmark.  There  was  a  passage,  he  remembered, 
leading  back  between  two  buildings,  which  projected  to  the 
sidewalk.  But  there  were  a  dozen  of  these  in  every  block. 

A  miserable  little  lunch-room  caught  his  eye,  displaying  in 
its  dingy  windows,  pies,  oranges,  big  shallow  pans  of  pork  and 
beans.  This  was  the  sort  of  place  Rose  would  have  to  come  to, 
he  reflected,  for  her  breakfast.  And  with  that  thought — 
hardly  the  conscious  hope  that  she  would  actually  come  to  this 
place  this  morning — he  turned  in,  sat  down  at  a  cloth  spotted 
with  coffee  and  catsup  stains,  and  ordered  his  breakfast  of  a 
yawning  waiter.  He  even  forced  himself,  when  it  was  brought 
in,  to  eat  it.  If  it  was  good  enough  for  Rose,  wasn't  it  good 
enough  for  him  ? 

And  all  the  while  he  kept  his  eye  on  the  street  door,  in  the 
irrepressible,  unacknowledged  hope  that  the  gods  would  be 
kind  enough  to  bring  her  there. 

But  it  was  a  mocking  hope,  he  knew,  and  he  didn't  linger 
after  he'd  finished.  He  walked  down-town  to  his  office.  It 
was  still  pretty  early — not  yet  eight  o'clock.  Even  his  office 
boy  wouldn't  be  down  for  three-quarters  of  an  hour.  He  was 
safe,  he  found  himself  saying,  for  so  long,  anyway. 

He  sat  down  at  his  desk  and  stared  bewildered  at  the  stack 
of  letters  that  lay  there  awaiting  his  signature.  They  were 
the  very  letters  Miss  Beach  had  been  typing  when  he  had  told 
her  to  telephone  to  the  club  and  get  him  a  seat  for  The  Girl 
Up-stairs,  by  way  of  passing  a  pleasant  evening; — and  had 
laughed  at  her  when  she  protested.  Oh,  God ! 

He  felt  like  a  sort  of  inverted  Eip  Van  Winkle — like  a  man 
who  had  been  away  twenty  years — in  hell  twenty  years ! — and 
coming  back  found  everything  exactly  as  he  had  left  it.  As 
if,  in  reality,  his  absence  had  lasted  only  overnight. 

He  pulled  himself  together  and  began  to  read  the  letters, 
but  interrupted  himself  before  he'd  gone  far,  to  laugh  aloud. 
The  laugh  startled  him  a  little.  He  hadn't  expected  to  do 
more  than  smile.  But  certainly  it  was  worth  a  laugh,  the  sol 
emn  importance  with  which  he'd  dictated  those  letters;  the 
notion  that  it  mattered  what  he  said,  how  he  advised  his 
clients  in  their  bloodless,  parchment-like  affairs;  that  any- 


372  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

thing  in  all  the  files  behind  the  black  door  of  that  vault  repre 
sented  more  than  the  empty  victories  and  defeats  of  a  childish 
game.  The  dead  smug  orderliness  of  the  place,  with  the  infal 
lible  Miss  Beach  as  its  presiding  genius,  infuriated  him. 
Clearly  he  couldn't  stay  here  till  he  was  better  in  hand  than 
this. 

He  signed  his  letters  without  reading  them,  and  scribbled  a 
note  to  Craig  that  he'd  been  called  out  of  town  for  a  day  or 
two  on  a  matter  of  urgent  personal  business.  He  hadn't 
thought  of  actually  going  out  of  town  until  the  note  was  writ 
ten.  But  once  he  saw  the  statement  in  black  and  white,  the 
notion  of  making  it  true,  invited  him.  He'd  run  off  to  some 
small  city  where  no  curious  eyes,  animated  by  the  knowledge 
that  he  was  Rodney  Aldrich  whose  wife  had  left  him  to  be 
come  a  chorus-girl,  could  steal  glances  at  him.  Where  he 
needn't  speak  to  any  one  from  morning  till  night.  Where  he 
could  really  get  himself  together  and  think. 

He  added  in  a  postscript  to  the  note  to  Craig,  instructions 
to  call  up  his  house  and  tell  them  he  was  out  of  town. 

The  thought  cropped  up  in  one  of  the  more  automatic  sec 
tions  of  his  brain,  that  for  traveling  he  ought  to  have  a  bag, 
night  things,  fresh  underclothes,  and  so  on,  and  the  routine 
method  of  supplying  that  need  suggested  itself  to  him; 
namely,  to  telephone  to  the  house,  have  one  of  the  maids  pack 
his  bag  for  him  and  send  it  down-town  in  the  car.  But  just 
as  he  had  rejected  the  notion  of  breakfasting  at  home,  and 
had  gone  out  to  that  miserable  Clark  Street  lunch-room  in 
stead,  so  he  rejected  this.  All  the  small  civilized  refinements 
of  his  way  of  life  went  utterly  against  his  grain.  They'd  con 
tinue  to  be  intolerable  to  him,  he  thought,  as  long  as  he  had  to 
go  on  envisaging  Eose  in  that  ghastly  environment  of  hers. 

He  left  his  office  and  turned  into  one  of  the  big  "department 
stores  that  backs  up  on  Dearborn  Street,  where  he  bought 
himself  a  cheap  bag  and  furnished  it  with  a  few  necessaries. 
Then,  leaving  the  store,  simply  kept  on  going  to  the  first  rail 
way  station  that  lay  in  his  way.  He  chose  a  destination  quite 
at  random.  The  train  announcer,  with  a  megaphone,  was 
calling  off  a  list  of  towns  which  a  train,  on  the  point  of  de- 


"I'M    ALL    ALOXE"  373 

parture,  would  stop  at.  Rodney  picked  one  that  he  had  never 
visited,  bought  a  ticket,  walked  down  the  platform  past  the 
Pullmans,  and  found  himself  a  seat  in  a  coach. 

He  found  a  measure  of  relief  in  all  this.  It  gave  him  the 
illusion,  at  least,  of  doing  something.  Or,  more  accurately,  of 
getting  ready  to  do  something,  while  it  liberated  him  from  the 
immediate  necessity  of  doing  it.  He'd  go  to  a  hotel  in  that 
town  whose  name  was  printed  on  his  ticket,  and  hire  a  room ; 
lock  himself  up  in  it,  and  then  begin  to  think.  Once  he  could 
get  the  engine  of  his  mind  to  going,  he'd  be  all  right.  There 
must  be  some  right  thing  to  do.  Or  if  not  that,  at  least  some 
thing  that  was  better  to  do  than  anything  else.  And  when 
his  mind  should  have  discovered  what  that  thing  was,  he'd 
have,  he  felt,  resolution  enough  to  go  on  and  do  it.  Until  he 
should  find  it,  he  was  like  a  man  shamed — naked,  unable  to 
encounter  the  most  casual  glance  of  any  of  the  persons  in  his 
world  who  knew  his  shame.  Once  he  was  safe  in  that  hotel 
room,  the  process  of  thinking  could  begin.  He  wouldn't  have 
to  hurry  about  it.  He  could  take  all  the  time  he  liked. 

For  the  present,  he  was  getting  a  queer  sort  of  comfort  out 
of  what  would  ordinarily  be  labeled  the  discomforts  of  hia 
surroundings:  the  fierce  dry  heat  of  the  car,  the  smells — that 
of  oranges  was  perhaps  the  strongest  of  these — the  raucous 
persistence  of  the  train  butcher  hawking  his  wares ;  and,  most 
of  all,  in  the  very  density  of  the  crowd. 

This  is  one  of  the  comforts  that  many  a  member  of  the 
favored,  chauffeur-driven,  servant-attended  class  lives  his  life 
in  ignorance  of,  the  nervous  relief  that  comes  from  ceasing, 
for  a  while,  to  be  an  isolated,  sharply  bounded,  perfectly  visi 
ble  entity,  and  subsiding,  indistinguishably,  into  a  mere  mass 
of  humanity;  in  being  nobody  for  a  while.  It  was  a  want 
which,  in  the  old  days  before  his  marriage,  Rodney  had  often, 
unconsciously,  felt  and  gratified.  He  had  enjoyed  being 
herded  about,  riding  in  crowded  street-cars,  working  his  way 
through  the  press  in  the  down-town  streets  during  the  noon 
hour. 

He  was  no  more  conscious  of  it  now,  but  it  was  distinctly 
pleasant  to  him  to  be  identified  for  the  conductor  merely  by 


3:i        THE  REAL  ADVENTUKE 

a  bit  of  blue  pasteboard  with  punch  marks  in  it,  stuck  in  his 
hat-band. 

The  pleasant  torpor  didn't  last  long,  because  presently,  the 
rhythmic  thud  of  the  wheels  began  singing  to  him  the  same 
dam<ned  tune  that  had  dogged  his  footsteps  earlier  that 
morning:  "I'm  all  alone,  you're  all  alone;  come  on,  let's  be 
lonesome  together." 

This  was  intolerable !  To  break  it  up,  he  bought  a  maga 
zine  from  the  train-boy  and  tried  to  read.  But  the  story  he 
lighted  on  concerned  itself  with  a  ravishingly  beautiful  young 
woman  and  an  incredibly  meritorious  young  man,  and  worked 
itself  out,  cleverly  enough  to  be  sure — which  made  it  worse — 
upon  the  assumption  that  all  that  was  needed  for  their  su 
preme  and  permanent  happiness  was  to  get  into  each  other's 
arms,  which  eventually  ihej  did. 

Rose  had  been  in  his  arms  last  night ! 

So  the  scorching  treadmill  round  began  again.  But  at  last 
sheer  physical  exhaustion  intervened  and  he  fell  heavily 
asleep.  He  didn't  waken  until  the  conductor  took  up  his  bit 
of  pasteboard  again,  shook  him  by  the  shoulder,  and  told  him 
that  he'd  be  at  his  destination  in  five  minutes. 

Presently,  in  the  hotel,  he  locked  his  door,  opened  the  win 
dow  and  sat  down  to  think. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
FBEDEBICA'S  PAEADOX 

Two  days  later,  at  half  past  eight  in  the  morning,  he 
walked  in  on  Frederica  at  breakfast  with  her  two  eldest  chil 
dren.  He  had  been  able  to  count  on  this  because  the  Whit- 
neys  had  a  certain  pride  in  preserving  some  of  the  customs  of 
the  generation  before  them;  at  least  Martin  had,  and  Fred- 
erica's  good-natured,  rueful  acquiescence  gave  her  at  once 
something  to  laugh  at  him  a  little  about  and  a  handy  leverage 
for  the  extraction  of  miscellaneous  concessions.  It  wasn't 
exactly  a  misdemeanor  to  be  late  to  breakfast — it  began 
promptly  at  eight  o'clock — but  it  was  distinctly  meritorious 
not  to  be.  Martin  never  was  and  he  always  left  the  house  for 
his  office  at  exactly  eight-twenty.  His  chauffeur  was  trained 
to  take  just  ten  minutes  trundling  the  big  car  down-town,  and 
eight-thirty  found  him  at  his  desk  as  invariably  as  it  had 
found  his  father  before  him.  It  was  all  perfectly  ritualistic, 
of  course.  There  wasn't  the  slightest  need  for  any  of  it. 

A  knowledge  of  the  ritual,  though,  stood  Rodney  in  good 
stead  this  morning.  He  liked  Martin  well  enough — had  really 
a  traditional  and  vicarious  affection  for  him.  But  he  was 
about  the  last  man  he  wanted  to  see  to-day. 

The  children  were  a  boy  of  ten,  Martin,  junior,  and  a  girl, 
Ellen,  of  eight.  There  was  a  three-year-old  baby,  too,  but  his 
nurse  looked  after  him.  They  had  finished  breakfast,  but 
Frederica  had  a  way  of  keeping  them  at  the  table  for  a  little 
while  every  morning,  chatting  with  her — oh,  about  any 
thing  they  pleased.  If  it  was  a  design  for  their  improve 
ment,  they  didn't  suspect  it.  The  talk  broke  off  short  when 
the  three  of  them,  almost  simultaneously,  looked  up  and  saw 
Rodney  in  the  doorway. 

"Hello !"  Frederica  said,  holding  out  a  hand  to  him,  but 
not  rising.  "Just  in  time  for  breakfast." 

375 


376  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

"Don't  ring,"  he  said  quickly.  "I've  had  all  I  want.  My 
train  got  in  an  hour  ago  and  I  had  a  try  at  the  station  res 
taurant." 

"Well,  sit  down  anyway,"  said  Frederica. 

"Take  this  chair,  Uncle  Rod,"  said  the  boy  in  a  voice  of 
brusk  indifference.  "Excuse  me,  mother?"  He  barely  waited 
for  her  nod  and  blundered  out  of  the  room. 

The  girl  came  round  to  Rodney's  chair  to  offer  him  her 
hand  and  drop  her  curtsy;  took  a  carnation  from  a  bowl 
on  the  table  and  tucked  it  into  his  button-hole,  slid  her  arm 
around  his  neck  and  kissed  his  cheek. 

Both  the  children,  Frederica  was  aware,  had  remarked 
something  troubled  and  serious  about  their  uncle's  manner 
and  each  had  acted  on  this  observation  in  his  own  way.  The 
boy,  distressed  and  only  afraid  of  showing  it,  had  bolted  from 
the  room  with  a  panicky  assumption  of  indifference.  The 
girl,  though  two  years  younger,  was  quite  at  ease  in  express 
ing  her  sympathy,  and  conscious  of  how  decoratively  she 
did  it.  (This  was  Frederica's  analysis,  anyhow.  As  is  the 
wont  of  mothers,  she  liked  the  boy  better.) 

"I  think  Miss  Norris  is  waiting  for  you,  my  dear." 

"Oui,  maman"  said  Ellen  dutifully. 

She  was  supposed  to  talk  French  all  the  morning,  but 
somehow  this  particular  observance  of  the  regime  irritated 
her  mother  a  little  and  she  rather  visibly  waited  while  Ellen 
quite  adequately  made  her  farewells  to  her  uncle  and  grace 
fully  left  the  room. 

The  tenseness  of  her  attitude  relaxed  suddenly  when  the 
child  was  gone.  She  reached  out  a  cool  soft  hand  and  laid 
it  on  one  of  Rodney's  that  rested  limply  on  the  table.  There 
was  rather  a  long  silence — ten  seconds  perhaps.  Then: 

"How  did  you  find  out  about  it?"  Rodney  asked. 

They  were  both  too  well  accustomed  to  these  telepathic 
short-cuts  to  take  any  note  of  this  one.  She'd  seen  that  he 
knew,  just  with  her  first  glance  at  him  there  in  the  door 
way;  and  something  a  little  tenderer  and  gentler  than  most 
of  her  caresses  about  this  one,  told  him  that  she  did.  What 
it  was  they  knew,  went  of  course  without  saying. 


FREDERICKS    PARADOX  377 

"Harriet's  back,"  she  said.  "She  got  in  day  before  yester 
day.  Constance  said  something  to  her  about  it,  thinking  she 
knew.  They've  thought  all  along  that  you  and  I  knew,  too. 
Harriet  was  quick  enough  and  clever  enough  to  pretend  she 
did  and  yet  find  out  about  it,  all  at  the  same  time.  So  that's 
so  much  to  the  good.  That's  better  than  having  them  find 
out  we  didn't  know.  Of  course  Harriet  came  straight  to 
me.  I'm  glad  it  was  Harriet  Constance  spoke  to  about  it  and 
not  me.  I'd  probably  have  given  it  away.  But  Harriet  never 
batted  an  eye/' 

"No,"  said  Rodney,  "Harriet  wouldn't." 

It  was  a  certain  dryness  in  his  intonation  rather  than  the 
words  themselves  Frederica  answered. 

"She'd  do  anything  in  the  world  for  you,  Roddy,"  she 
said,  with  a  vaguely  troubled  intensity. 

This  time  his  mind  didn't  follow  hers.  For  an  instant  he 
misunderstood  her  pronoun,  then  he  saw  what  she  meant. 

"Harriet? — Oh,  yes,  Harriet's  all  right,"  he  said  absently. 

She  left  his  preoccupation  alone  for  a  minute  or  two,  but 
at  last  broke  in  on  it  with  a  question.  "How  did  you  find 
out  about  it,  Roddy?  Who  told  you?" 

"Xo  one,"  he  said  in  a  voice  unnaturally  level  and  dry.  "I 
went  to  see  the  show  on  the  recommendation  of  a  country 
client,  and  there  she  was  on  the  stage." 

"Oh !"  cried  Frederica — a  muffled,  barely  audible  cry  of 
passionate  sympathy.  Then: 

"Roddy,"  she  demanded,  "are  you  sure  it's  true?  Are  you 
absolutely  sure  that  it's  really  Rose?  Or  if  it  is,  that  she's 
in  her  right  mind — that  she  hasn't  just  wandered  off  as  peo 
ple  do  sometimes  without  knowing  who  they  are?" 

"There's  nothing  in  that  notion,"  he  said.  "It's  Rose  all 
right,  and  she  knows  what  she's  doing." 

"You  mean  you've  seen  her  off  the  stage — talked  with 
her?" 

He  nodded. 

She  pulled  in  a  long  sigh  of  anticipatory  relief. 

"Well,  then,"  she  demanded,  "what  did  she  say?  How  did 
she  explain  how  she  could  have  done  such  a  thing  as  that?" 


378  THE   EEAL   ADVBNTUBB 

"I  didn't  ask  her  to  explain,"  said  Rodney.  "I  asked  her 
to  come  home,  and  she  wouldn't." 

"Oh,  it's  wicked !"  she  cried.  "It's  the  most  abominably 
selfish  thing  I  ever  heard  of !" 

He  made  a  gesture  of  protest,  but  it  didn't  stop  her. 

"Oh,  I  suppose,"  she  flashed,  "she  didn't  mean  any  harm — 
wasn't  just  trying  to  do  the  cruelest  thing  she  could  to  you. 
But  it  would  be  a  little  less  infuriating  if  she  had." 

"Pull  up,  Freddy !"  he  said.  Eather  gently  though,  for 
him.  "There's  no  good  going  on  like  that.  And  besides 
.  .  .  You  were  saying  Harriet  would  do  anything  in  tlio 
world  for  me.  Well,  there's  something  you  can  do.  You're  the 
only  person  I  know  who  can." 

Her  answer  was  to  come  around  behind  his  chair,  put  her 
cheek  down  beside  his,  and  reach  for  his  hands. 

"Let's  get  away  from  this  miserable  breakfast  table,"  she 
said.  "Come  up  to  where  I  live,  where  we  can  be  safely  by 
ourselves;  then  tell  me  about  it." 

In  front  of  her  boudoir  fire,  looking  down  on  her  as  she 
sat  in  her  flowered  wing  chair,  an  enormously  distended  rug- 
covered  pillow  beside  her  knees  waiting  for  him  to  drop  down 
on  when  he  felt  like  it,  he  began  rather  cautiously  to  tell  her 
what  he  wanted. 

"I'll  tell  you  the  reason  why  I've  come  to  you/'  he  began, 
"and  then  you'll  see.  Do  you  remember  nearly  two  years 
ago,  the  night  I  got  wet  coming  down  here  to  dinner — the 
night  you  were  going  to  marry  me  off  to  Hermione  Wood 
ruff  ?  We  had  a  long  talk  afterward,  and  you  said,  speaking 
of  the  chances  people  took  getting  married,  that  it  wasn't  me 
you  worried  about,  but  the  girl,  whoever  she  might  be,  who 
married  me." 

The  little  gesture  she  made  admitted  the  recollection,  but 
denied  its  relevancy.  She'd  have  said  something  to  that  ef 
fect,  but  he  prevented  her. 

"No,"  he  insisted,  "it  wasn't  just  talk.  There  -was  some 
thing  to  it.  Afterward,  when  we  were  engaged,  two  or  three 
times,  you  gave  me  tips  about  things.  And  since  we've  been 
married  .  .  .  Well,  somehow,  I've  had  the  feeling  that 


FREDERICKS    PARADOX  379 

you  were  on  her  side;  that  you  saw  things  her  way — thingi 
that  I  didn't  see." 

"Little  things,"  she  protested;  "little  tiny  things  that 
couldn't  possibly  matter — things  that  any  woman  would  be 
on  another  woman's — side,  as  you  say,  about." 

But  she  contradicted  this  statement  at  once.  "Oh,  I  did 
love  her !"  she  said  fiercely.  "Not  just  because  she  loved  you, 
but  because  I  thought  she  was  altogether  adorable.  I  couldn't 
help  it.  And  of  course  that's  what  makes  me  so  perfectly 
furious  now — that  she  should  have  done  a  thing  like  this  to 
you." 

"All  right,"  he  said.  "Never  mind  about  that.  This  is 
what  I  want  you  to  do.  I  want  you  to  go  to  see  her,  and  I 
want  you  to  ask  her,  in  the  first  place,  to  try  to  forgive  me." 

"What  for?"  Frederica  demanded. 

"I  want  you  to  tell  her,"  he  went  on,  "that  it's  impossible 
that  she  should  be  more  horrified  at  the  thing  I  did  than 
I  am  myself.  I  want  you  to  ask  her,  whatever  she  thinks  my 
deserts  are,  to  do  just  one  thing  for  me,  and  that  is  to  let 
me  take  her  out  of  that  perfectly  hideous  place.  I  don't  ask 
anything  else  but  that.  She  can  make  any  terms  she  likes. 
She  can  live  where  or  how  she  likes.  Only — not  like  that. 
Maybe  it's  a  deserved  punishment,  but  I  can't  stand  it !" 

There  was  the  crystallization  of  what  little  thinking  he 
had  managed  to  do  in  the  two  purgatorial  days  he'd  spent  in 
that  down-state  hotel — in  the  intervals  of  fighting  off  the  tor 
turing  jingle  of  that  tune,  and  the  memory  of  the  dull  frozen 
agony  he'd  seen  in  Rose's  face  as  he  left  her.  No  great  result, 
truly.  The  mountain  had  labored  and  brought  forth  a  mouse. 

But  reflect  for  a  moment  what  Rodney's  life  had  been ;  how 
gently,  for  all  his  buoyant  theories  about  the  acceptance  of 
discipline,  the  world,  in  its  material  aspect  at  any  rate,  had 
dealt  with  him.  How  completely  that  boyish  arrogance  of 
his  had  been  allowed  to  grow  unbruised  by  circumstance.  He'd 
always  been  rich,  in  the  sense  that  his  means  had  always  been 
sufficient  to  his  wants.  He'd  never  in  his  life  had  an  experi 
ence  that  even  resembled  Portia's  with  that  old  unpaid  gro 
cery  bill.  He'd  enjoyed  wearing  shabby  clothes,  but  he'd 


380  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

never  worn  them  because  he  could  afford  no  better.  He'd  al 
ways  been  democratic  in  the  narrower  social  sense,  but  he'd 
never  realized  how  easy  that  sort  of  democracy  is  and  how 
little  it  means  to  a  man  never  associated  with  persons  who 
assert  a  social  superiority  over  him.  He'd  always  made  a 
point  of  despising  luxuries,  to  be  sure.  But  it  hadn't  been 
brought  to  his  attention  at  how  high  a  level  he  drew  the 
line  between  luxuries  and  mere  decent  necessities. 

He  wasn't  then,  near  so  much  of  a  Spartan  as  he  thought. 
His  long  association  with  the  Lakes  and  their  friends  might, 
you'd  think,  have  brought  him  the  consolatory  reflection  that 
a  woman  who  earned  even  a  successful  chorus-girl's  wages, 
needn't  be  pitied  too  lamentably  on  the  score  of  poverty; 
that  Rose  could,  no  doubt,  have  afforded  a  better  room  than 
that,  if  she'd  wanted  to.  And  that  even  a  three-dollar  room, 
a  whole  room  that  you  hadn't  to  share  with  anybody,  would 
— if  the  rent  of  it  left  you  money  enough  to  send  out  your 
clothes  to  the  laundry  and  to  buy  adequate  meals  in  restau 
rants — represent  luxury — well,  to  more  people  than  one  likes 
to  think  about. 

Rodney  knew  that  well  enough,  of  course.  He'd  read  the 
Sage  Foundation  reports  on  housing;  he  was  familiar  with 
the  results  of  the  Pittsburgh  Survey.  But  the  person  in  ques 
tion  now,  wasn't  the  Working  Girl.  It  was  his  Rose ! 

Out  of  all  the  chaos  of  thought  and  feeling  that  had  been 
boiling  within  him  since  the  night  he  had  gone  with  Rose 
to  her  room,  there  emerged,  then,  two  outstanding  ideas.  One 
was  that  he  had  outraged  her;  the  other  that  she  simply 
couldn't  be  allowed  to  go  on  living  as  he  had  found  her. 

Frederica,  naturally,  was  mystified.  "That's  absurd,  of 
course,  Roddy,"  she  said  gently.  "You  haven't  done  anything 
to  Rose  to  be  forgiven  for." 

"You'll  just  have  to  take  my  word  for  it,"  he  said  shortly. 
"I'm  not  exaggerating." 

"But,  Roddy !"  she  persisted.  "You  must  be  sensible.  Oh, 
it's  no  wonder!  You're  all  worn  out.  You  look  as  if  you 
hadn't  slept  for  nights.  I  wish  you'd  sit  down  and  be  a  little 
bit  comfortable.  But  I  know  you're  wrong  about  that! 


FREDERICKS    PARADOX  381, 

"I  went  out  to  California  with  the  idea  that  you  might 
have  been — well,  awfully  stupid  about  something  and  hurt 
Rose  dreadfully  without  knowing  it.  I  was  perfectly  ready 
to  be — on  her  side,  as  you  say.  I  thought  we'd  have  a  good 
talk  and  I'd  find  out  what  it  was  all  about,  and  then  come 
home  and  pack  you  out  there  yourself. 

"Well,  of  course  I  didn't  see  Rose,  and  Portia  wasn't  very 
communicative.  She'd  always  been  a  little  stiff  with  me.  I 
never  managed  to  get  her  altogether.  But  she  was  clear 
enough  about  it  at  any  rate,  that  Rose  was  more  in  love  with 
you  than  ever  and  she  didn't  blame  you  for  a  thing.  The 
thing  that  she  seemed  most  anxious  about  was  that  her 
mother  shouldn't  blame  you.  Of  course  that  took  the  wind 
out  of  my  sails  and  I  had  to  come  back.  So  it's  absurd  for 
you  to  be  talking  as  if  she  had  a  real  reason  for — detesting 

you." 

"She  hadn't,  then,"  said  Rodney,  and  he  walked  uneasily 
away  to  the  window. 

"Well,  if  you  mean  the  other  night,  the  only  time  you've 
seen  her  since,  then  it's  all  the  more  ridiculous.  What  if 
you  were  angry  and  lost  your  temper  and  hurt  her  feelings? 
Heavens !  Weren't  you  entitled  to,  after  what  she'd  done  ? 
And  when  she'd  left  you  to  find  it  out  like  that?" 

"I  tell  you  you  don't  know  the  first  thing  about  it." 

"I  don't  suppose  you — beat  her,  did  you  ?"  It  was  too  in 
furiating,  having  him  meek  like  this! 

His  reply  was  barely  audible.  "I  might  better  have  done 
it." 

Frederica  sprang  to  her  feet.  "Well,  then,  I'll  tell  you !" 
she  said.  "I  won't  go  to  her.  I'll  go  if  you'll  give  me  a  free 
hand.  If  you'll  let  me  tell  her  what  I  think  of  what  she's 
done  and  the  way  she's  done  it — not  letting  you  know — not 
giving  you  a  chance.  But  go  and  beg  her  to  forgive  you,  I 
won't. 

"All  right,"  he  said  dully.  "You're  within  your  rights,  of 
course." 

The  miserable  scene  dragged  on  a  little  longer.  Frederica 
cried  and  pleaded  and  stormed,  without  moving  him  at  all. 


382  THE    EEAL    ADVENTUEE 

He  seemed  distressed  at  h«r  grief,  urged  her  to  treat  his  re 
quest  as  if  he  hadn't  made  it;  but  he  explained  nothing,  an 
swered  none  of  her  questions. 

It  was  an  enormous  relief  to  her,  and,  she  fancied,  to  him, 
for  that  matter,  when,  after  a  premonitory  knock  at  the 
door,  Harriet  walked  in  on  them. 

The  situation  didn't  need  much  explaining,  but  Frederica 
summed  it  up  while  the  others  exchanged  their  coolly  friendly 
greetings,  with  the  statement: 

"Bod's  been  trying  to  get  me  to  go  to  Eose  and  say  that  it 
was  all  his  fault,  and  I  won't." 

"Why  not?"  said  Harriet.  "What  earthly  thing  does  it 
matter  whose  fault  it  is?  He  can  have  it  his  fault  if  he 
likes." 

"You  know  it  isn't,"  Frederica  muttered  rebelliously. 

Harriet  seated  herself  delicately  and  deliberately  in  one  of 
the  curving  ends  of  a  little  Victorian  sofa,  and  stretched  her 
slim  legs  out  in  front  of  her. 

"Certainly  I  don't  care  whose  fault  it  is,"  she  said.  "You 
never  get  anywhere  by  trying  to  decide  a  question  like  that. 
What  I'm  interested  in  is  what  can  be  done  about  it.  It's  not 
a  very  nice  situation.  Nobody  likes  it — at  least  I  should  think 
Eose  would  be  pretty  sick  of  it  by  now.  She  may  have  been 
crazy  for  a  stage  career,  but  she's  probably  seen  that  the 
chorus  of  a  third-rate  musical  comedy  won't  take  her  any 
where. 

"The  thing's  simply  a  mess,  and  the  only  thing  to  do,  is  to 
clear  it  up  as  quickly  and  as  decently  as  we  can — and  it  can 
be  cleared  up,  if  we  go  at  it  right.  Only,  for  the  love  of 
Heaven,  Freddy,  before  you  let  Eod  go  out  of  the  house,  give 
him  a  dose  of  veronal  and  pack  him  off  to  a  quiet  room  up 
stairs  to  sleep  around  the  clock !  The  way  he  looks  now,  he's 
a  proclamation  of  calamity  across  the  street !" 

She  wasn't  at  all  disturbed  by  the  outburst  this  provoked 
from  Eodney.  Indeed,  Frederica,  from  a  glimpse  she  got 
of  her  face  as  she  sat  listening  to  his  blistering  denunciation 
of  this  apparently  whole-hearted  concern  for  appearances,  and 
his  passionate  denial  that  they  meant  anything  at  all  to  him, 


•\\hat  eat'tlily  thinj;   '|<K->  it  matter  whose   fault  it   i>v 


FREDERICKS   PARADOX  383 

suspected  that  her  sister's  words  had  been  calculated  to  pro 
duce  just  this  result.  "When  it  had  subsided,  Harriet's  first 
words  proved  it. 

"All  right,"  she  observed.  "I  knew  you'd  want  to  say  that. 
Now,  it's  off  your  mind.  Appearances  do  matter  to  Freddy 
and  me,  and  of  course  they  matter  to  you  too,  though  you 
don't  like  to  think  so.  They  matter  to  all  our  kind  of  people. 
We're  supposed  to  have  been  trained  to  take  our  medicine 
without  making  faces.  If  we've  got  cuts  and  sores  and 
bruises,  we  cover  them.  We  don't  parade  them  as  a  bid  for 
sympathy.  We  leave  howling  about  rights  and  wrongs  and 
soul-mates  and  affinities  and  'ideals/  to  the  shabby  sort  of 
people  who  like  to  do  that  shabby  sort  of  thing.  According 
to  our  traditions,  the  decent  thing  to  do  is  to  shut  up  and 
keep  your  face  and  make  it  possible  for  other  people  to  keep 
theirs.  You're  as  strong  for  that  as  I  am,  really,  Rod,  and 
that's  why  I  want  you  to  back  me  up  in  the  line  I  took  with 
Constance.  Pretend  you've  known  all  about  what  Rose  was 
doing,  and  that  you  aren't  ashamed  of  it.  It  would  have 
been  easier,  of  course,  if  she'd  played  fair  with  us  at  the 
start  .  .  ." 

"She  did  play  fair,"  he  interrupted.  "She  offered  to  tell 
me  what  she  was  going  to  do.  I  wouldn't  let  her." 

Harriet's  only  commentary  on  this  was  a  faint  shrug. 

"Anyhow,"  she  went  on,  "the  point  is  that  once  we  begin 
pretending,  everybody  else  will  have  to  pretend  to  believe  us. 
Of  course  the  thing  to  do  is  to  get  her  out  of  that  horrible 
place  as  soon  as  we  can.  And  I  suppose  the  best  way  of  doing 
it,  will  be  to  get  her  into  something  else — take  her  down 
to  New  York  and  work  her  into  a  small  part  in  some  good 
company.  Almost  anything,  if  it  came  to  that,  as  long  as  it 
wasn't  music.  Oh,  and  have  her  use  her  own  name,  and  let 
us  make  as  much  of  it  as  we  can.  Face  it  out.  Pretend  we 
like  it.  I  don't  say  it's  ideal,  but  it's  better  than  this." 

"Her  own  name !"  he  echoed  blankly.  "Do  you  mean  she 
made  one  up?" 

Harriet  nodded.  "Constance  mentioned  it,"  she  said,  "but 
that  was  before  I  knew  what  she  was  talking  about.  And  of 


384:  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

course  I  couldn't  go  back  and  ask.  Daphne  something,  I 
think.  It  sounded  exactly  like  a  chorus  name,  anyhow/'  And 
then :  "Well,  how  about  it  ?  Will  you  play  the  game  ?" 

"Oh,  yes,"  he  said  with  a  docility  that  surprised  Frederica. 
"I'll  play  it.  It  comes  to  exactly  the  same  thing,  what  we 
both  want  done,  and  our  reasons  for  doing  it  are  important 
to  nobody  but  ourselves." 

She  turned  to  Frederica. 

"You  too,  Freddy  ?"  she  asked.  "Will  you  give  your  moral 
principles  a  vacation  and  take  Eod's  message  to  Rose,  even 
though  you  may  think  it's  Quixotic  nonsense?" 

"I'll  see  Rose  myself,"  said  Rodney  quietly. 

It  struck  Frederica  that  if  not  his  natural  self,  he  had  gone 
a  long  way  at  least,  to  recovering  his  natural  manner.  Tell 
ing  Martin  all  about  it  that  night,  as  she  always  told  him 
about  everything  (because  Martin  was  Fred  erica's  discovery 
and  her  secret.  No  one  else  suspected,  not  even  Martin  him 
self,  how  intelligent  and  understanding  he  was,  nor  how 
luminous  his  simple  remarks  about  complex  situations  could 
sometimes  be),  she  adverted  to  a  paradox  which  had  often 
puzzled  her  in  the  past.  Rodney  was  twice  as  fond  of  her  as 
he  was  of  Harriet,  just  as  she  was  twice  as  fond  of  him  as 
Harriet  was.  And  yet,  again  and  again,  where  her  own  love 
and  sympathy  had  failed  dismally  to  effect  anything,  Har 
riet's  dry  astringent  cynicism  would  come  along  and  produce 
highly  desirable  results. 

"It  seems  as  if  it  oughtn't  to  work  out  that  way,"  she  con 
cluded.  "You'd  think  that  loving  a  person  and  feeling  his 
troubles  the  way  he  feels  them  himself,  ought  to  enable  you 
to  help  him  rather  than  just  irritate.  However,  as  long  as  it 
doesn't  work  that  way  with  you  .  .  ." 

He  reached  out,  took  her  by  the  chin,  tilted  her  face  back 
and  kissed  her  expertly  on  the  mouth.  A  rather  horrifyingly 
familiar  thing  to  do,  one  might  think,  to  the  Venus  of  Milo, 
or  Frederica,  or  any  one  as  simply  and  grandly  beautiful  as 
that.  But  she  seemed  to  like  it. 

"No  chance  for  the  experiment,"  said  Martin.  "I  shall 
never  have  any  troubles  while  you're  around." 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE   HIRY   WAT 

RODNEY'S  docility  didn't  go  to  the  length  of  the  dose  of 
veronal  Harriet  had  recommended,  but  it  did  assent  to  a 
program  that  occupied  the  greater  part  of  the  day,  including 
a  Turkish  bath,  a  good  sleep,  fresh  clothes  and  the  first  de 
cently  cooked  meal  he  had  had  since  he'd  dined  at  the  club 
three  days  ago.  When  he  turned  into  his  office,  about  five 
o'clock,  he  was  his  own  man  again,  perfectly  capable  of  a 
greeting  to  Craig  and  Miss  Beach  which  consigned  the  last 
scene  between  them  here  in  the  office  to  oblivion. 

His  fortitude  was  put  to  the  test,  too,  during  the  first  five 
minutes.  In  the  stack  of  correspondence  on  his  desk,  to  which 
Miss  Beach  directed  his  attention,  was  an  unopened  envelope 
addressed  to  him  in  Rose's  handwriting.  He  couldn't  restrain, 
of  course,  a  momentary  wild  hope  that  she  had  written  to 
tell  him  he  was  forgiven,  or  at  least  to  offer  him  the  chance 
of  asking  her  forgiveness.  But  he  paused  to  steel  himself 
against  this  hope  before  looking  to  see  what  the  thing  con 
tained. 

It  was  well  he  did  so,  because  there  was  nothing  in  it  but  a 
postal  money-order  for  a  hundred  dollars ;  not  an  explanatory 
line  of  any  sort.  Of  course  the  message  it  carried  didn't  need 
writing.  It  smarted  like  a  slap  across  the  face.  Yet,  down 
underneath  the  smart,  he  felt  something  that  glowed  more 
deeply,  a  feeling  he  couldn't  have  named  or  recognized,  of 
pride  in  her  courage. 

He  was  badly  in  need  of  something  to  be  proud  of,  too,  for 
the  next  two  days  were  full  of  humiliations. 

When  he  told  Harriet  and  Frederica  that  he  would  see 
Rose  himself,  he  hadn't  any  program  for  carrying  out  this 
intention.  He  didn't  want  to  wait  for  her  again  at  the  stage 

385 


386  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

door.  There  mustn't  be  anything  about  their  next  talk  to 
gether  to  remind  her  of  their  last  one,  and  it  would  be  better 
if  she  could  be  assured  in  advance  that  she  had  nothing  to 
fear  from  him.  So  the  first  thing  to  do  was  to  write  her  a 
letter  that  would  show  her  how  he  felt  and  how  little  he 
meant  to  ask.  But  before  he  could  write  the  letter,  he  must 
learn  her  name. 

He  thought  of  Jimmy  Wallace  as  a  person  who'd  be  able 
to  help  him  out,  here,  but  in  the  circumstances  Jimmy  was 
the  last  person  he  wanted  to  go  to.  There  was  no  telling  how 
much  Jimmy  might  know  about  the  situation  already.  The 
intolerable  thought  occurred  to  him  that  Eose  might  even 
have  talked  with  Jimmy  about  going  on  the  stage  before  she 
left  his  house.  No,  the  person  to  see  was  the  manager  of-  the 
theater.  He'd  describe  Eose  to  him  and  ask  him  who  she  was. 

His  attempt  to  carry  out  this  part  of  his  plan  was  disas 
trously  unsuccessful.  Theatrical  managers  no  doubt  cherish 
an  ideal  of  courteous  behavior.  But,  since  ninety-nine  out  of 
a  hundred  of  the  strangers  who  ask  for  them  at  the  box-office 
window,  are  actuated  by  a  desire  to  get  into  their  theaters 
without  paying  for  their  seats,  they  develop,  protectively,  a 
manner  of  undisguised  suspicion  toward  all  people  who  don't 
know  them,  and  toward  about  three-quarters  of  those  who 
pretend  they  do.  It  wasn't  a  manner  Eodney  was  accustomed 
to,  and  it  irritated  him.  Then,,  until  he  had  got  his  request 
half  stated,  it  didn't  occur  to  him  in  what  light  the  manager 
would  be  amply  justified  in  regarding  it.  That  notion,  which 
he  interpreted  from  a  look  in  the  manager's  face,  confused 
and  angered  him,  and  he  stumbled  and  stammered,  which  an 
gered  him  still  more. 

"We  don't  do  that  sort  of  thing  in  this  theater,"  the  man 
ager  said  loudly  (the  conversation  had  taken  place  in  the 
lobby  of  the  theater,  too)  and  turned  away. 

The  grotesque  improbability  of  the  true  explanation  that 
the  woman  whose  name  he  was  inquiring  about  was  his  wife, 
silenced  him  and  turned  him  away.  It  was  fortunate  for  Eod 
ney  it  did  so.  The  thing  would  have  made  a  wonderful  story 
for  the  press  agent,  if  he  kadn't  stopped  just  where  he  did. 


THE    MIRY   WAY  387 

He  spent  the  rest  of  that  evening,  and  a  good  part  of  the 
next  day,  trying  to  think  of  some  alternative  to  waiting  again 
at  the  stage  door.  But,  except  for  the  still  inadmissible  one 
of  going  to  Jimmy  Wallace,  he  couldn't  think  of  one. 

So,  at  a  quarter  past  seven  that  night,  he  stationed  himself 
once  more  in  the  miserable  alley,  to  wait  for  Rose.  Seeing 
her  before  the  show  would,  he  thought,  be  an  improvement 
on  waiting  till  after  it.  The  mere  fact  that  they  wouldn't  have 
very  long  to  talk,  ought  to  reassure  her  that  he  didn't  mean 
to  take  any  advantages.  He  could  show  her  how  contrite  he 
was,  how  little  he  meant  to  ask,  and  then  leave  it  to  her  to  se 
lect  a  place,  at  her  own  leisure  and  convenience,  to  talk  over 
the  terms  of  their  treaty. 

He  waited  from  a  quarter  after  seven  to  half  past  eight, 
but  Rose  didn't  come.  The  thought  that  perhaps  he  hadn't 
taken  his  station  early  enough  sent  him  back  to  another  vigil 
at  half  past  ten.  At  a  quarter  to  twelve,  his  patience  ex 
hausted,  he  opened  the  stage  door  and  told  the  doorman  he 
was  waiting  for  one  of  the  girls  in  the  sextette.  The  door 
man  informed  him  they  had  all  gone  home. 

There  was,  unfortunately,  no  matinee  the  next  day,  and 
it  was  only  by  the  exercise  of  all  the  will  power  he  had,  that 
he  stayed  in  his  office  and  did  his  work  and  waited  for  the 
hour  of  the  evening  performance.  Then  he  went  to  the  the 
ater  and  bought  a  ticket.  When  the  sextette  made  its  first  ap 
pearance  on  the  stage,  he  saw  that  another  girl  than  Rose 
was  taking  her  part.  He  went  out  into  the  lobby,  and  once 
more  sought  the  manager.  But  this  time  with  a  different  air. 

"Haven't  you  an  office  somewhere  where  we  can  talk?"  he 
demanded.  "This  is  important." 

Evidently  the  manager  saw  it  was,  because  he  conducted 
him  to  a  small  room  with  a  desk  in  it,  half-way  up  the  bal 
cony  stairs,  and  nodded  him  to  a  chair. 

"There  was  a  young  woman  in  your  company,"  Rodney 
said,  "in  the  sextette.  She  isn't  playing  to-night.  I  want  to 
know  what  her  stage  name  is,  and  where  she  can  be  found. 
I  assure  you  that  it's  of  the  first  importance  to  her  that  I 
should  find  her." 


388  THE    EEAL    ADV1NTTTBE 

The  manager's  manner  was  different,  too.  He  looked  per 
plexed  and  rather  unhappy.  But  he  didn't  tell  Eodney  what 
he  wanted  to  know. 

"She's  left  the  company/'  he  said,  "permanently.  That's 
all  I  can  tell  you." 

"Is  she  ill?"  Eodney  demanded. 

The  manager  said  not  that  he  knew  of,  but  this  was  all  that 
was  to  he  got  out  of  him. 

The  thing  that  finally  silenced  Eodney  and  sent  him  away, 
was  the  reflection  that  the  man  might  be  withholding  infor 
mation  about  her,  on  Eose's  own  request. 

He  went  away,  sore,  angry,  discouraged.  Jimmy  Wallace 
seemed  about  the  onty  hope  there  was.  But  he'd  be  damned 
if  he'd  go  to  Jimmy.  Not  yet,  anyway.  And  then  he  thought 
of  Portia! 

She'd  tell  him.  She'd  have  to  tell  him.  Why  hadn't  he 
thought  of  her  before?  He'd  write  to  her  the  message  to 
Eose  he'd  tried  to  get  Frederica  to  carry.  No,  he  wouldn't 
do  that !  He'd  go  to  her.  And  there  was  a  chance  .  .  . 
Why,  there  was  the  best  kind  of  chance !  Why  hadn't  he 
thought  of  it  before?  Why  had  he  been  such  an  idiot  as  to 
waste  all  these  days ! 

It  seemed  almost  certain  he'd  find  Eose  there  with  her. 
She'd  felt — she  couldn't  have  helped  feeling  after  the  things 
he'd  said  to  her  that  ghastly  night  in  the  little  North  Clark 
Street  room — that  she  couldn't  go  on.  And  stripped  of  her 
job  like  that,  with  nothing  else  to  turn  to,  where  should  she 
go  but  home  to  her  mother  and  sister?  To  the  only  friends 
and  comforters  she  had  in  the  world. 

He'd  send  no  word  in  advance  of  his  coming.  He'd  just 
come  up  to  the  door  of  the  little  bungalow  and  ring  the  bell. 
And  there  was  a  chance  that  the  person  who'd  come  to  answer 
it  would  be  Eose  herself. 

The  idea  came  to  him  all  in  a  flash  as  he  walked  away 
from  the  theater,  and  his  impulse  from  it  was  to  jump  into 
a  taxicab  and  catch  a  ten-thirty  train  to  the  coast,  that  he 
had  just  time  for.  He  denied  the  impulse  as  part  of  the  dis 
cipline  he'd  been  imposing  on  himself  since  his  talk  with 


THE    MIRY    WAY  389 

Harriet,  and  went  home  instead.  From  now  on  he  was  going 
to  act  like  a  reasonable  man,  not  like  a  distracted  one. 

He  had  his  bag  packed  and  his  tickets  bought  the  next 
morning,  went  to  the  office  and  put  things  in  train  to  accom 
modate  a  week's  absence,  wrote  a  note  to  Frederica  telling 
her  of  his  discovery  that  Eose  had  left  the  company  of  The 
Girl  Up-slairs,  and  of  his  hope  of  finding  her  in  California 
with  her  mother  and  Portia;  and  when  he  settled  himself 
in  his  compartment  for  the  three-day  ride  he  even  had  two 
or  three  books  in  his  bag  to  pass  the  time  with,  as  if  it  had 
been  an  ordinary  journey.  He  didn't  make  much  of  them,  it's 
true,  but  his  honest  attempt  to,  gave  him  the  glimmering 
dawn  of  a  discovery. 

The  cardinal  principle  of  his  life,  if  such  a  thing  could 
be  stated  in  a  phrase,  was  self-expression  through  self-dis 
cipline.  Well,  his  discovery  was  (it  didn't  come  to  much 
more  than  a  surmise,  it  is  true,  but  it  was  a  beginning) 
that  in  his  relations  to  Rose  he'd  never  disciplined  himself 
at  all.  The  network  of  his  instincts,  passions,  desires,  that 
had  involved  her,  had  been  allowed  to  grow  unchecked,  un- 
scrutinized.  He  didn't  begin  to  scrutinize  them  now.  He 
was  in  no  mind  for  the  task.  How  could  he  undertake  it 
until  the  fearful  hope  that  he  was  actually  on  the  way  to  her 
now  should  have  been  answered  one  way  or  the  other! 

It  proved  a  vain  hope.  The  person  who  answered  his  ring 
at  the  door  of  the  little  bungalow,  on  that  wonderful  sun 
bathed,  rose-scented  morning  (false  auguries  that  mocked  his 
disappointment  and  made  it  almost  intolerable)  was  Portia. 

She  flushed  at  sight  of  him,  then  almost  as  quickly  went 
pale.  She  stepped  outside  the  door  and  closed  it  behind  her 
before  she  spoke. 

"I'm  afraid  I  mustn't  let  mother  know  you're  here,"  she 
said.  "She's  not  been  well  these  last  days  and  she  mustn't 
be  excited.  I  don't  want  to  let  her  suspect  that  things  have 
changed  or  in  any  way  gone  wrong  with  Rose.  I  told  her  I 
was  going  out  for  a  walk.  Will  you  come  with  me  ?" 

He  nodded  and  did  not  even  speak  until  they'd  got  safely 
away  from  the  house.  Then: 


390  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

"I  came  out  here,"  he  said,  "almost  sure  that  I  should  find 
her.  Isn't  she  here  ?" 

"No,"  said  Portia.  Then  she  added  with  a  sort  of  gasp, 
as  if  she'd  tried  to  check  her  words  in  their  very  utterance, 
"Don't  you  know  her  better  than  that?" 

"Do  you  know  where  she  is?" 

This  question  she  didn't  answer  at  all.  They  walked  on 
a  dozen  paces  in  silence. 

"Portia,"  he  demanded,  "is  she  ill?  You'll  have  to  tell 
me  that." 

Even  this  question  she  didn't  answer  immediately.  "No," 
she  said  at  last.  "She's  not  ill.  I'll  take  the  responsibility 
of  telling  you  that." 

"You  mean  that's  all  you  will  tell  me?"  he  persisted. 
"Why  ?  On  her  instructions  ?" 

"I  think  we'll  have  to  sit  down  somewhere,"  said  Portia. 
"Beside  the  road  over  there  where  it's  shady." 

"I  got  a  letter  from  Rose  yesterday,"  she  said,  after  they'd 
been  seated  for  a  while.  "She  asked  me  in  it  not  to  go  on 
writing  you  the  little — bulletins  that  I'd  been  sending  every 
week;  not  to  tell  you  anything  at  all.  So  }rou  see  I've  gone 
rather  beyond  her  instructions  in  saying  even  as  much  as 
I  have." 

"And  you,"  he  asked  quickly;  "you  mean  to  comply  with 
a  request  like  that?" 

"I  must,"  said  Portia.     "I  can't  do  anything  else." 

He  made  no  comment  in  words,  but  she  interpreted  his 
uncontrollable  gesture  of  angry  protest,  and  answered  it. 

"It's  not  a  question  of  conscientious  scruples;  keeping  my 
word,  not  betraying  a  confidence;  anything  like  that.  A 
year  ago  if  she'd  made  such  a  request  I'd  have  paid  no  atten 
tion  to  it.  I'd  have  taken  the  responsibility  of  acting  against 
her  wishes,  for  her  own  good,  if  I  happened  to  see  it  that 
way,  without  any  hesitation  at  all.  But  Rose  has  shown  her 
self  so  much  bigger  and  stronger  a  person  than  I,  and  she's 
done  a  thing  that  would  have  been  so  splendidly  beyond  my 
courage  to  do  that  there's  no  question  of  my  interfering. 
She's  entitled  to  make  her  own  decisions.  So,"  she  went  on 


THE    MIKY    WAY  391 

with  a  little  difficulty,  "I  shan't  betray  her  confidence  nor 
disregard  her  instructions.  But  there's  one  thing  I  can  do, 
one  thing  I  can  tell  you,  because  it's  my  confidence,  not 
hers." 

The  very  obvious  fact  that  her  confidences  were  not  of 
great  moment  to  him,  the  way  he  sat  there  beside  her  in  a 
glum  abstraction  through  the  rather  long  silence  that  fol 
lowed  her  preface,  made  it  easier  for  her  to  go  on. 

"You  see,"  she  said  at  last,  "I'd  always  regarded  Rose  as 
a  spoiled  child.  I'd  loved  her  a  lot,  of  course ;  but  I'd  despised 
her  a  little.  At  least  I'd  tried  to,  because  I  was  jealous  of 
her;  of  the  big  simple  easy  way  she  had — of  making  people 
love  her.  All  the  hard  things  came  to  me,  I  felt,  and  all 
the  easy  ones  to  her.  And  on  the  day  I  came  to  tell  her 
about  mother,  and  how  we  had  to  move  out  here — well,  I 
was  feeling  sorrier  for  myself  than  usual.  If  you'll  remem 
ber  when  that  was  and  what  her  condition  was  (I  didn't 
know  about  it  then  and  neither  did  she)  you'll  understand 
my  having  found  her  terribly  blue  and  unhappy.  She  talked 
discontentedly  about  her — failure  with  you  and  how  she 
seemed  to  be  nothing  to  you  except  .  .  .  "Well,  she  said 
she  envied  me.  And  that,  as  I  was  feeling  just  then,  was  too 
much  for  me.  I  lashed  out  at  her;  told  her  a  lot  of  things 
she'd  never  known — about  how  we'd  lived,  and  so  on;  things 
I'd  done  for  her.  I  said  she'd  got  my  life  to  live  as  well  as 
her  own,  and  that  if  she  failed  with  it  I'd  never  forgive  her. 
She  made  me  a  promise  that  she  wouldn't,  no  matter  how 
hard  she  had  to  fight  for  it." 

"She  spoke  to  me  once  of  a  promise,"  Rodney  said  dully, 
"but  of  course  I  didn't  know  what  she  meant." 

Portia  got  to  her  feet.  "I  can't  leave  mother  for  very 
long,"  she  said,  "and  I've  some  little  errands  at  the  shops 
before  I  can  go  back.  So  .  .  ." 

"I  see,"  he  said.  "I  mustn't  detain  you  any  longer.  I 
don't  know,  anyhow,  that  there's  anything  more  to  say." 

"I'm  sorry  I  can't — help  you.  You're  entitled  to — hate 
me,  I  think.  Because  it  all  goes  back  to  that.  I've  been 
glad  of  a  chance  to  tell  you.  And  that  makes  me  all  the 


392  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

sorrier  that  I  can't  in  any  way  make  it  up  to  you.  But  you 
see — don't  you — how  it  is?" 

"Yes,"  he  said.  "I  see.  I  suppose,  if  it  came  to  hating, 
that  you're  entitled  to  hate  me.  But  there'll  be  no  great  sat 
isfaction  in  that,  I  guess,  for  either  of  us."  He  held  out  his 
hand  to  her  and  with  a  painful  sort  of  shy  stiffness,  she 
grasped  it.  "If  Eose  changes  her  instructions,  or  if  you 
change  your  mind  as  to  your  duty  under  them,  you'll  let  me 
know?" 

She  nodded.    "Good-by,"  she  said. 

Eodney  walked  back  to  the  railway  station  where  he  had 
checked  his  bag.  In  two  hours  he  was  on  a  train  bound  back 
to  Chicago. 

Various  things  occurred  to  him  during  the  journey  east 
ward  that  he  might  have  said  to  Portia.  He  hadn't  asked, 
for  instance,  whether  Eose's  embargo  on  news  of  herself  to 
him  had  been  made  effective  also  in  the  other  direction.  Had 
she  cut  herself  off  from  Portia's  bulletins  about  himself  and 
the  babies?  Could  Portia  have  transmitted  a  message  from 
him  to  Eose — the  one  Frederica  had  declined  to  take?  But 
he  felt  in  a  way  rather  glad  that  he  hadn't  asked  any  more 
questions,  nor  offered  any  messages.  He  wasn't  looking  now 
for  an  intermediary  between  Eose  and  himself.  He  wanted 
Eose,  and  he  meant  to  find  her.  His  whole  mind,  by  now, 
had  crystallized  into  that  hard-faceted,  sharp-edged  deter 
mination.  The  sore  masculine  vanity  that  had  kept  him  from 
appealing  to  the  man  most  likely  to  be  able  to  help  him  was 
almost  incredible  now. 

From  the  railway  station  in  Chicago,  the  moment  he  got 
in,  he  telephoned  Jimmy  Wallace  at  his  newspaper  office. 
It  was  then  about  half  past  four  in  the  afternoon.  Jimmy 
couldn't  leave  for  another  hour,  it  seemed.  It  was  his  after 
noon  at  home  to  press  agents,  and  he  always  gave  them  till 
five-thirty  to  drop  in.  But  he  didn't  think  there  were  likely 
to  be  any  more  to-day,  and  if  Eodney  would  come  over  .  .  . 

Eodney  got  into  a  taxi  and  came,  and  found  the  critic  at 
his  shabby  old  desk  under  a  green-shaded  electric  light,  in 
the  midst  of  a  vast  solitude,  the  editorial  offices  of  an  eve- 


THE    MIRY    WAY  393 ' 

ning  newspaper  at  that  hour  being  about  the  loneliest  place 
in  the  world.  There  was  a  rusty  look  about  this  particular 
local  room,  too,  that  made  you  wonder  that  any  real  news 
ever  could  emanate  from  it.  Yet  only  this  afternoon  they 
had  beaten  the  city  in  the  announcement  of  the  failure  of 
the  Mortimore-Milligan  string  of  banks. 

"I've  come,"  said  Rodney,  finding  a  sort  of  fierce  satisfac 
tion  in  grasping  the  nettle  as  tightly  as  possible,  "to  see  if 
you  can  tell  me  anything  about  my  wife." 

Jimmy  may  have  felt  a  bit  flushed  and  flustered,  but  the 
fact  didn't  show,  and  an  imaginative  insight  he  was  in  the 
habit  of  denying  the  possession  of  led  him  to  draw  most  of 
the  sting  out  of  the  situation  with  the  first  words  he  said. 

"I'll  tell  you  all  I  know,  of  course,  but  it  isn't  much.  Be 
cause  I  haven't  had  a  word  with  her  since  the  last  time  I 
dined  at  your  house,  way  back  last  September,  I  think  it  was. 
I  saw  her  on  the  stage  at  the  Globe,  the  opening  night  of 
The  Girl  Up-stairs,  and  I  saw  that  she  recognized  me.  That's 
how  I  knew  it  was  really  she.  And — well,  I  want  you  to 
know  this !  I  haven't  told  anybody  that  she  was  there." 

"You  needn't  tell  me  that,"  said  Rodney.  "I'm  sure  of 
it.  But  I'm  glad  you  did  tell  me  the  other  thing.  But  here's 
the  situation :  she's  left  that  company ;  left  it,  I  believe,  as  a 
result  of  a  talk  I  had  with  her  after  I  found  her  there,  and 
I  don't  know  where  she  is.  The  one  thing  I  have  got  to  do 
just  now  is  to  find  her.  I've  asked  at  the  theater,  and  they 
won't  tell  me.  I  imagine  they're  acting  on  her  instructions. 
And  as  I  don't  eren  know  the  name  she  goes  by  I've  found 
it  pretty  hard  to  get  anywhere.  I  want  you  to  help  me." 

"Her  name  there  at  the  Globe  was  Doris  Dane,"  said 
Jimmy,  "and  I  imagine  that  unless  she's  left  the  show  busi 
ness  altogether  she'll  have  kept  it;  because  it  would  be,  in  a 
small  way,  an  asset.  And,  as  she'll  be  easier  to  find  if  she 
has  stayed  in  the  business  than  if  she  hasn't,  why,  that's  the 
presumption  to  begin  on." 

He  lighted  his  pipe  and  lapsed  into  a  thoughtful  silence. 
"There  are  two  things  she  may  have  done,"  he  went  on  after 
a  while.  "She  may  have  gone  to  New  York,  and  in  that  case 


394  THE   EEAL   AD  VENTURE 

she's  likely  to  have  applied  to  the  man  who  put  on  The  Girl 
out  here;  that's  John  Galbraith.  He  took  quite  an  interest 
in  her,  I  understand;  believed  she  had  a  future.  But  the 
other  thing  she  may  have  done  strikes  me  as  a  little  more 
likely.  How  long  ago  was  it  you  talked  to  her  ?" 

"It's  the  better  part  of  two  weeks,"  said  Eodney. 

"Well/'  said  Jimmy,  "they  sent  out  a  Number  Two  com 
pany  of  The  Girl  Up-Stairs  a  week  ago  last  Sunday  night. 
If  she  had  any  reason  for  wanting  to  leave  Chicago  she 
might,  I  should  think,  have  gone  to  them  and  asked  them  to 
let  her  go  out  on  the  road  with  that.  They  wouldn't  have 
done  it,  of  course,  unless  she'd  convinced  them  that  she  was 
going  to  quit  the  Chicago  company  anyway.  But  if  she  had 
convinced  them  of  that  they'd  have  done  it  right  enough. 
On  the  whole,  that  seems  to  me  the  likeliest  place  to  look." 

"Yes,"  said  Eodney,  "I  think  it  is.  Well,  have  you  any 
way  of  finding  out  where  the  Number  Two  company  is  play- 
ing?" 

Jimmy  was  rummaging  in  the  litter  of  magazines  on  the 
top  of  his  desk.  He  pulled  one  out  and  searched  among  the 
back  pages  of  it  for  a  moment. 

"Here  we  are !"  he  said.  "The  Girl  Up-stairs"  and  he  be 
gan  reading  off  the  route.  "They're  playing  to-night,"  he 
said,  "at  Cedar  Eapids;  to-morrow  night  in  Dubuque." 

"All  right,"  said  Eodney.  "The  next  thing  to  find  out  is 
whether  she's  with  the  company.  Who  is  there  we  can  tele 
phone  to  out  there?" 

"Why,"  said  Jimmy,  "I  suppose  we  might  raise  the  man 
ager  of  the  opera-house.  They're  at  Cedar  Eapids  to-night, 
and  we  might  get  a  good  enough  wire  so  that  a  proper  name 
would  be  understood."  He  glanced  at  his  watch.  "But 
there's  a  quicker  and  surer  and  cheaper  way,  and  that's  to 
ask  Alec  McEwen.  He's  the  press  agent  of  the  company 
here,  and  he'd  be  sure  to  know." 

"He'd  know,"  Eodney  demurred,  "but  would  he  tell?" 

"He'd  tell  me,"  said  Jimmy. 

"Can  you  find  him?"  Eodney  wanted  to  know.  "Where 
would  he  be  at  this  time  of  day — at  his  office  or  his  house  ?" 


THE    MIRY   WAY  395 

He  hadn't  any  office  nor  any  house,  Jimmy  said.  "But 
since  he's  undoubtedly  cleaned  up  the  newspaper  offices  by 
now,  on  his  weekly  round,"  he  concluded,  "we  can  find  him 
easily  enough.  I'll  guarantee  to  locate  him — within  three 
bars.  There'll  be  no  one  in  to  see  me  after  this,"  he  went 
on,  slamming  down  the  roll-top  to  his  desk,  getting  up  and 
reaching  for  his  overcoat,  "so  we  may  as  well  go  straight 
at  it." 

They  walked  down  to  the  street  entrance  in  silence.  There 
Jimmy,  with  a  nonchalance  that  rang  a  little  flat  on  his 
own  ear,  pulled  up  and  said : 

"Look  here !  There's  no  need  your  trailing  around  on  this 
job.  Tell  me  where  you  will  be  in  an  hour  and  I'll  call 
you  up." 

"Oh,  I've  nothing  else  to  do,"  said  Rodney,  "and  I'll  be 
glad  to  go  along." 

They  were  at  cross-purposes  here.  Jimmy  didn't  want  him 
along.  He  had  a  hunch  that  Eodney  wouldn't  find  little 
Alec  very  satisfactory,  but  he  didn't  know  just  how  to  say  so. 
Rodney,  on  his  part,  strongly  disrelished  the  notion  of  trail 
ing  the  press  agent  from  bar  to  bar.  But  he  attributed  the 
same  distaste  to  Jimmy  and  felt  it  wouldn't  be  fair  not  to 
share  it  with  him.  There  was,  besides,  a  certain  satisfaction 
in  making  his  pride  do  penance. 

Jimmy  hadn't  overestimated  his  knowledge  of  little  Alec 
McE wen's  orbit.  They  walked  together  to  the  corner  of 
Clark  and  Randolph  Streets  and,  working  radially  from 
there,  in  the  third  bar  they  found  him. 

Even  before  this,  however,  Rodney  regretted  that  he  hadn't 
let  Jimmy  do  the  job  alone.  He  was  not  an  habitue  of  the 
sumptuous  bars  of  the  Loop,  and  the  voices  of  the  men  he 
found  in  them,  the  sort  of  men  they  were,  and  the  sort  of 
things  they  talked  about  found  raw  nerves  all  over  him.  On 
another  errand,  he  realized,  he  wouldn't  have  minded.  But  it 
seemed  as  if  Rose  herself  were  somehow  soiled  by  the  neces 
sity  of  visiting  places  like  this  in  search  of  information  about 
her. 

The  feeling  he  had  come  back  with  from  that  down-state 


396  THE   EEAL   ADVEXTUKE 

town  to  which  he  had  fled,  that  she  was  in  a  miry  pit  from 
which,  at  any  cost,  she  must  be  saved,  had  been  a  good  deal 
weakened  during  the  ten  days  that  had  intervened  since 
then.  Her  having  sent  back  that  hundred  dollars;  what 
Portia  had  said  about  her  courage;  Harriet's  notion  that  a 
stage  career,  if  properly  managed,  was  something  one  could 
at  least  pretend  not  to  be  ashamed  of ;  and,  most  lately,  what 
Jimmy  Wallace  had  said  about  the  Xew  York  director  who 
thought  she  had  a  future — all  these  things  had  contributed 
to  the  result. 

But  this  pursuit,  from  one  drinking  bar  to  another,  of  the 
only  man  who  could  tell  him  where  she  was,  was  bringing  the 
old  feeling  back  in  waves. 

"Here  we  are,"  said  Jimmy,  as  they  entered  the  third  place. 

It  was  a  cramped  cluttered  room,  thick  with  highly  var 
nished,  carved  woodwork  and  upholstered  leather.  Its  prin 
cipal  ornament  was  a  nude  Bouguereau  in  a  red-draped  al 
cove,  heavily  overlighted  and  fearfully  framed;  the  sort  of 
picture  any  one  would  have  yawned  at  in  a  gallery,  it  ac 
quired  here,  from  the  hard-working  indecency  of  its  intent, 
a  weak  salaciousness. 

Eodney  found  himself  being  led  up  to  a  group  in  the  far 
corner  of  the  bar,  and  guessed  rightly  that  the  young  man 
with  the  high  voice  and  the  seemingly  permanent  smile,  who 
greeted  Jimmy  with  a  determined  facetiousness,  "Hello,  old 
Top !  Drunk  again  ?"  was  the  man  they  sought. 

"Not  yet,"  said  Jimmy,  "but  I'm  willing  to  help  you  along. 
What'll  it  be?"  Then  to  Eodney:  "This  is  Mr.  Alexander 
McEwen,  the  leading  liar  among  our  local  press  agents."  He 
added  quickly :  "You  didn't  come  around  this  afternoon,  so 
I  suppose  there's  nothing  stirring.  How's  business  over  at 
the  Globe?" 

"Immense,"  said  Alec.    "Sold  out  three  times  last  week." 

"Do  you  hear  anything,"  Jimmy  asked,  "about  the  road 
company,  what  they're  doing?" 

"Eotten,"  said  Alec.  "But  that  don't  worry  Goldsmith  and 
Block.  They  sold  out  their  road  rights  to  Block's  brother- 
in-law." 


THE    MIRY   WAY  397 

"By  the  way,"  said  Jimmy,  "who's  the  girl  in  the  sextette 
that's  quit?" 

"Doris  Dane?"  said  little  Alec.  "Say  no  more.  So  you 
were  on  that  lay,  too,  you  old  fox !"  His  smile  widened  as 
he  looked  round  at  Rodney,  and  his  voice  turned  to  a  crow. 
"Trust  this  solemn  old  bird  not  to  miss  a  bet.  She  was  some 
lady,  all  right !  Why,"  he  went  on  to  Jimmy,  "she  has  some 
sort  of  a  row  with  her  lover;  big  brute  that  used  to  lie  in 
wait  for  her  in  the  alley.  You  ought  to  hear  the  ponies  go 
on  about  it.  So  she  gets  scared  and  goes  to  Goldsmith  and 
gets  herself  sent  out  with  the  Number  Two.  And  Gold 
smith — believe  me — crazy!  He  had  his  eye  on  it,  too." 

Jimmy  finished  his  drink  with  a  jerk.  "Come  along,"  he 
said  to  Rodney.  "I  don't  like  this  place.  Let's  get  out." 

Rodney  has  never  managed  to  forget  little  Alec  McEwen. 
For  weeks  after  that  bar-room  encounter  he  was  haunted  by 
the  vision  of  the  small  bright  prying  eyes,  the  fatuously  cyn 
ical  smile,  and  by  the  sound  of  the  high  crowing  voice.  Little 
Alec  became  monstrous  to  him;  impersonal,  a  symbol  of  the 
way  the  world  looked  at  Rose,  and  he  dreamed  sometimes, 
half-waking  dreams,  of  choking  the  life  out  of  him.  Not  out 
of  little  Alec  personally.  He,  obviously,  wasn't  worth  it ;  but 
out  of  all  the  weakly  venomous  slander  that  he  typified. 

He  managed  a  nod  that  seemed  unconcerned  enough,  in 
response  to  Jimmy's  suggestion,  and  followed  him  out  to  the 
sidewalk.  The  sort  of  florid  rococo  chivalry  that  would  have 
"vindicated  his  wife's  honor"  by  knocking  little  Alec  down 
was  an  inconceivable  thing  to  him.  But  the  thing  cut  deep. 
He  felt  bemired.  He  wouldn't  have  minded  that,  of  course, 
except  that  the  miry  way  he'd  trodden  since  he'd  first  gone 
to  the  stage  door  for  Rose  was  the  way  she's  taken  ahead  of 
him.  He  must  overtake  her  and  bring  her  back ! 

"I'm  a  thousand  times  obliged,"  he  said  in  an  even  enough 
tone  to  Jimmy.  "I'll  find  her  at  Dubuque,  then,  to-mor 
row." 

"That's  Wednesday,"  said  Jimmy.  "They  may  be  playing 
a  matinee,  you  know.  She'll  be  there,  right  enough." 

Then,  to  make  the  separation  they  both  wanted  come  a 


398  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

little  easier,  he  invented  an  errand  over  on  State  Street  and 
nodded  Eodney  farewell.  For  the  next  half-hour  he  cursed 
himself  with  vicious  heartfelt  fluency  for  a  fool.  Mightn't 
he  have  known,  what  little  Alec  McEwen  would  say  ? 


CHAPTER  XV 

IN  FLIGHT 

ANALYZING  what  little  Alec  McEwen  actually  said,  disre 
garding  the  tone  of  his  voice  and  the  look  in  his  eye;  disre 
garding,  indeed,  the  meaning  he  attached  to  his  own  words, 
and  sticking  simply  to  the  words  themselves,  it  would  be  diffi 
cult  to  bring  home  against  him  the  charge  of  untruthfulness, 
or  even  of  exaggeration. 

Because  it  was  in  a  simple  panic  that  Rose,  on  the  morn 
ing  after  Rodney's  visit,  had  gone  to  Goldsmith  and  de 
manded  to  be  transferred  to  the  second  company,  which  had 
started  rehearsing  as  soon  as  a  month  of  capacity  business 
had  demonstrated  that  the  piece  was  a  success. 

Goldsmith  was  disgusted.  Little  Alec  had  been  right  about 
that,  too.  The  unnaturalness  of  the  request — for  indeed  it 
flew  straight  in  the  face  of  all  traditions  that  a  girl  who 
might  stay  in  Chicago  if  she  liked,  taking  it  easy  and  having 
a  lot  of  fun,  and  rejoicing  in  the  possession  of  a  job  that  was 
going  to  last  for  months,  should  deliberately  swap  this  highly 
desirable  position  for  the  hazards  and  discomforts  of  a  sec 
ond-rate  road  company,  playing  one-night  stands  over  the 
kerosene  circuit — was  one  too  many  for  him.  He  demanded 
explanations  without  getting  any.  And  as  Jimmy  Wallace 
had  guessed,  it  was  not  until  she'd  convinced  him  that  in  no 
circumstances  would  she  stay  on  in  the  Chicago  company  that 
he  assented  to  the  transfer.  He  didn't  abandon  his  attempts 
to  dissuade  her  until  the  very  last  moment.  But  neither 
his  pictures  of  the  discomforts  of  the  road,  nor  his  care 
fully  veiled  promises  of  further  advancement  if  she  stayed  in 
Chicago,  had  the  slightest  effect  on  her.  All  that  she  wanted 
was  to  get  away,  and  as  quickly  as  she  could ! 

The  collapse  of  her  courage  was  not  quite  the  sudden  thing 

399 


400  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

it  seemed.  Forces  she  was  vaguely  aware  had  been  at  work, 
but  didn't  realize  the  seriousness  of,  had  been  undermining 
it  steadily  since  the  opening  night  when  she  recognized 
Jimmy  Wallace  in  the  audience,  and  when  later  she  parted 
from  Galbraith  with  his  promise  of  a  Xew  York  job  as  soon 
as  he  could  get  his  own  affairs  ready  for  her. 

Chief  of  these  forces  was  the  simple  reaction  of  fatigue. 
Strong  as  she  was,  she  had  abused  her  strength  somewhat 
during  the  last  weeks  of  rehearsal;  had  taken  on  and  tri 
umphantly  accomplished  more  than  any  one  has  a  right  to 
accomplish  without  calculating  on  replacing  his  depleted 
capital  of  energy  afterward.  It  was  her  first  experience  with 
this  sort  of  exhaustion,  and  she  hadn't  learned  (indeed  it  is 
a  lesson  she  never  did  fully  learn)  to  accept  the  phase  with 
philosophic  calm  as  the  inevitable  alternate  to  the  high-ten 
sion  effective  one. 

She  missed  Galbraith  horribly.  She  had,  as  she'd  told  him, 
personified  the  show  as  a  mere  projection  of  himself ;  he  was 
it  and  it  was  he.  Everything  she  said  and  did  on  the  stage 
had  continued,  as  it  had  begun  in  her  very  first  rehearsal  by 
being,  just  the  expression  of  his  will  through  her  instrumen 
tality.  It  was  amazing  to  her  that,  with  the  core  of  it  drawn 
out,  the  fabric  should  still  stand ;  that  the  piece  should  go  on 
repeating  itself  night  after  night,  automatically,  awakening 
the  delighted  applause  of  that  queer  foolish  monster,  the 
audience,  just  with  its  galvanic  simulation  of  the  life  he  had 
once  imparted  to  it. 

She  was  doing  her  own  part,  she  felt  at  all  events,  in  a 
manner  utterly  lifeless  and  mechanical.  It  was  a  stifling 
existence ! 

The  most  discouraging  thing  about  it  was  that  the  others 
in  the  company  seemed  not  to  feel  it  in  the  same  way.  Ana- 
bel  Astor  for  example :  night  after  night  she  seemed  to  be 
born  anew  into  her  part  with  the  rise  of  the  first  curtain; 
she  fought  and  conquered  and  cajoled,  and  luxuriated  in  the 
approbation  of  every  new  audience,  just  as  she  had  in  the 
case  of  the  first,  and  came  off  all  aglow  with  her  triumph,  as 
if  the  thing  had  never  happened  to  her  before.  And  with 


IN    FLIGHT  401 

the  others,  in  varying  degrees,  even  with  the  chorus  people, 
the  effect  seemed  to  be  the  same. 

But  it  was  actually  in  the  air,  Rose  believed,  not  merely 
in  her  own  fancy,  that  she  was  failing  to  justify  the  promise 
she  had  given  at  rehearsal.  Not  alarmingly,  to  be  sure.  She 
was  still  plenty  good  enough  to  hold  down  her  job.  But  the 
notion,  prevalent,  it  appeared,  before  the  opening,  that  she 
was  one  of  those  persons  who  can't  be  kept  down  in  the 
chorus,  but  project  themselves  irresistibly  into  the  ranks  of 
the  principals,  was  coming  to  be  considered  a  mistake. 

Galbraith,  as  was  evident  from  his  last  talk  with  her, 
hadn't  made  that  mistake.  She  remembered  his  having  said 
she  never  could  be  an  actress.  That  was  all  right  of  course. 
She  didn't  want  to  be.  In  a  way,  it  was  just  because  she 
didn't  want  to  be  that  she  couldn't  be.  But  having  it  come 
home  to  her  as  it  was  doing  now,  in  her  own  experience,  made 
her  all  the  more  impatient  to  get  out  of  the  profession  that 
wasn't  hers  and  into  the  one  that  had  beckened  her  so  allur 
ingly- 

It  was  just  here  that  her  disappointment  was  sharpest. 
The  light  that  for  a  few  weeks  had  flared  up  so  brightly, 
showing  a  clear  path  of  success  that  would  lead  her  back  to 
Eodney,  had,  suddenly,  just  when  she  needed  it  most,  gone 
out  and  left  her  wondering  whether,  after  all,  it  had  been  a 
true  beacon  or  only  fool's  fire. 

A  resolution  she  came  to  within  twenty-four  hours  after 
Galbraith  left  was  that  she  would  not  wait  passively  for  his 
letter  summoning  her  to  New  York.  She'd  go  straight  to 
work  (and  fill  in  the  disconcerting  emptiness  of  her  days  at 
the  same  time)  preparing  herself  for  the  profession  of  stage 
costume  designing.  She  wasn't  entirely  clear  in  her  mind 
as  to  just  what  steps  this  preparation  should  consist  in,  but 
the  fact  that  Galbraith  had  once  asked  to  see  her  sketches 
and  had  seemed  amazed  to  learn  that  she  hadn't  any,  gave 
her  the  hint  that  she  might  do  well  to  learn  to  draw. 

She  knew,  of  course,  that  she  couldn't  learn  very  much  in 
the  fortnight  or  so  she  supposed  would  elapse  before  Gal- 
braith's  letter  came  in,  but  she  could  learn  a  little.  And  any- 


402  THE    BEAL    ADVENTURE 

thing  to  do  that  went  in  the  right  direction  was  better  than 
blankly  doing  nothing. 

Her  first  adventure  in  this  direction  was  downright  ludi 
crous,  as  she  was  aware  without  being  able  to  summon  the 
mood  to  appreciate  it.  The  girls  she'd  known,  back  in  the 
Edgewater  days,  who  had  ambitions  to  learn  to  draw  went 
to  the  Art  Institute.  So  Rose,  summoning  her  courage  for 
a  sortie  across  the  avenue,  went  there  too,  and  felt,  as  she 
climbed  the  steps  between  the  lions,  a  little  the  way  Chris 
tian  did  in  similar  circumstances.  After  waiting  a  while 
she  was  shown  into  the  office  of  an  affable  young  man,  with 
efficient  looking  eye-glasses  and  a  keen  sort  of  voice,  and  told 
him  with  admirable  brevity  that  she  wanted  to  learn  to  draw, 
as  a  preliminary  to  designing  costumes. 

He  approved  this  ambition  cordially  enough  and  made  it 
evident  that  the  resources  of  the  institute  were  entirely  ade 
quate  to  her  needs.  But  then,  just  about  simultaneously, 
she  made  the  discovery  that  the  course  he  was  talking  about 
was  one  of  from  three  to  five  years'  duration,  and  he,  that  the 
time  immediately  at  her  disposal  amounted  to  something  like 
a  fortnight.  They  were  mutually  too  completely  disconcerted 
to  do  anything,  for  a  moment,  but  stare  at  each  other.  When 
he  found  his  breath  he  told  her  that  he  was  afraid  they 
couldn't  do  anything  for  her. 

"There  are  places,  of  course,  here  in  town  (there's  one  right 
down  the  street)  where  they'll  take  you  on  for  a  month,  or  a 
week,  or  a  day,  if  you  like;  let  you  begin  working  in  oil  in 
the  life  class  the  very  first  morning,  if  you've  a  notion  to. 
But  we  don't  believe  in  that  get-rich-quick  sort  of  business. 
We  believe  in  laying  the  foundation  first." 

His  manner  in  describing  the  other  sort  of  place  had  been 
so  annihilating,  his  purpose  in  citing  this  horrible  example 
was  so  plain,  that  he  was  justifiably  taken  aback  when  she 
asked  him,  very  politely,  to  be  sure,  "Would  you  mind  tell 
ing  me  where  that  other  place  is ;  the  one  down  the  street  ?" 

He  did  mind  exceedingly,  and  it  is  likely  he  wouldn't  have 
done  it  if  she'd  been  less  extraordinarily  good  to  look  at  and 
if  there  hadn't  been,  in  her  very  expressive  blue  eyes,  a  gleam 


IN    FLIGHT  403 

that  suggested  she  was  capable  of  laughing  at  him  for  having 
trapped  himself  like  that.  She  wasn't  laughing  at  him  now, 
be  it  understood;  had  made  her  request  with  a  quite  ador 
able  seriousness.  Only  .  .  . 

He  gave  her  the  address  of  an  art  academy  on  Madison 
Street  and  thither  at  once  she  made  her  way,  faintly  cheered 
by  the  note  on  which  her  encounter  with  the  young  man  had 
ended,  but  on  the  whole  rather  depressed  by  the  thought  of 
the  five  years  he'd  talked  about. 

They  were  more  tactful  at  the  new  place.  Ars  Longa  est 
was  not  a  motto  they  paraded.  They  were  not  shocked  at  all 
at  the  notion  of  a  young  woman's  learning  as  much  as  she 
could  about  drawing  in  two  weeks.  There  was  a  portrait 
sketch  class  every  morning;  twenty  minute  poses.  You  put 
down  as  much  as  you  could  of  how  the  model  looked  to  you 
in  that  space  of  time,  and  then  began  again  on  something 
else.  All  the  equipment  Rose  would  need  was  a  big  apron,  a 
stick  of  charcoal  and  a  block  of  drawing  paper;  all  of  which 
were  obtainable  on  the  premises.  She  could  begin  this  min 
ute  if  she  liked.  It  was  almost  as  simple  as  getting  on  a  pay- 
as-you-enter  street-car. 

This  jumped  with  Rose's  mood  exactly,  and  she  promptly 
fell  to,  with  a  momentary  flare-up  of  the  zest  with  which  she 
had  gone  to  work  for  Galbraith.  But  it  was  only  momentary. 
She  hadn't  a  natural  aptitude  for  drawing,  and  her  attempts 
to  make  the  black  lines  she  desperately  dug  and  smudged  into 
the  white  paper  represent,  recognizably,  the  object  she  was 
looking  at  failed  so  lamentably  as  to  discourage  her  almost 
from  the  start. 

She  kept  at  it  for  the  two  weeks  she'd  contracted  for,  but 
at  the  end  of  that  time  she  gave  it  up.  She  hadn't  made  any 
visible  progress,  and  besides,  she  might  be  hearing  from  Gal 
braith  almost  any  day  now. 

And  when,  four  or  five  days  later,  her  intolerable  restless 
ness  over  waiting  for  a  letter  that  didn't  come,  making  up 
reasons  why  it  hadn't  come,  one  minute,  and  deciding  that  it 
never  would,  the  next,  drove  her  to  do  something  once  more, 
she  set  out  on  a  new  tack.  If  the  ability  to  make  fancy  little 


404 

water-colors  of  impossible-looking  girls  in  only  less  impossible 
costumes  were  really  an  essential  part  of  the  business  of  de 
signing  the  latter,  then  she'd  have  to  set  about  learning,  in  a 
systematic  way,  to  paint  them ;  find  out  the  proper  way  to  be 
gin,  and  take  her  time  about  it.  Her  two  weeks  at  the 
academy  had  proved  that  it  wasn't  a  knack  that  she  could  pick 
up  casually.  But  there  were  books  on  costumes,  she  knew; 
histories  of  clothes,  that  went  as  far  back  as  any  sort  of  his 
tories,  with  marvelous  colored  plates  which  gave  you  all  the 
details.  Bertie  Willis  had  told  her  all  about  that  when  they 
were  getting  up  their  group  for  the  Charity  Ball.  There  were 
shelves  of  them,  she  knew,  over  at  the  Newberry  Library.  A 
knowledge  of  their  contents  would  be  sure  to  be  valuable  to 
her  when  Galbraith  should  set  her  to  designing  more  costumes 
for  him — if  ever  he  did. 

This  misgiving,  that  she  might  nerer  hear  from  him,  that 
his  plans  had  changed  since  their  talk,  so  that  he  wasn't  going 
to  need  any  assistant,  or  that  he  had  found  some  one  in  New 
York  better  qualified  for  the  work,  was,  really,  a  little  artifi 
cial.  She  encouraged  it  as  a  defense  against  another  which 
was,  in  its  insidious  way,  much  more  terrifying. 

Would  she  ever  be  capable,  again,  of  producing  another  idea 
in  case  it  should  be  wanted  ?  That  one  little  flash  of  inspira 
tion  she'd  had,  that  had  resulted  in  the  twelve  costumes  for 
the  sextette — where  had  it  come  from?  How  had  she  hap 
pened  on  it?  Wasn't  it,  perhaps,  just  a  fluke  that  never 
could  be  repeated  ?  During  those  wonderful  days  she  had  had 
antennae  out  everywhere,  bringing  her  impressions,  sugges 
tions  from  the  unlikeliest  objects.  Now  they  were  all  drawn 
in  and  the  part  of  her  mind  that  had  responded  to  them  felt 
numb. 

She  ignored  this  sensation,  or  rather  this  absence  of  sensa 
tion,  as  well  as  she  could ;  just  as  one  might  ignore  the  creep 
ing  approach  of  paralysis.  She  had  an  unacknowledged  rea 
son  for  going  to  the  library  and  beginning  that  historic  study 
of  costumes.  Certainly  the  sight  of  those  quaint  old  plates 
ought  to  set  her  imagination  racing  again. 

But  it  didn't  work  that  way.     She  found  herself  poring 


IN    FLIGHT  405 

over  them,  yawning  herself  blind  over  the  French  legends  that 
accompanied  them.  (They  were  nearly  all  in  French,  these 
books,  and  though  Rose  had  done  two  years'  work  in  this  lan 
guage  at  the  university  and  passed  all  her  examinations,  she 
found  these  technical  descriptions  of  costumes  frightfull}r 
hard  to  understand.)  She  stuck  at  it,  though,  for  a  long 
while,  until  one  morning  a  comparison  occurred  to  her  that 
made  her  shut  the  folio  with  a  slam.  It  had  been  in  just  this 
way,  with  just  this  dogged,  blind,  hopeless  persistence,  that, 
ages  ago,  in  that  former  incarnation,  she'd  tried  to  study  law ! 

This  was  too  much  for  her.  She  walked  out  of  the  library 
with  the  best  appearance  of  unconcern  that  she  could  muster, 
— it  had  been  a  near  thing  that  she  didn't  break  down  and  cry 
— and  she  did  not  go  back.  Probably  it  was  just  as  well  that 
Galbraith  hadn't  sent  for  her.  She'd  only  have  made  a 
ghastly  failure  of  it,  if  he  had. 

The  background,  of  course,  to  all  these  endeavors  and  dis 
couragements,  or,  to  describe  it  more  justly,  the  indivisible, 
all-permeating  ether  they  floated  about  in,  was,  just  as  it  had 
been  in  the  time  of  her  success — Eodney.  The  occupations, 
routine  and  otherwise,  that  she  gave  her  mind  to,  might  seem, 
in  a  way,  to  crowd  him  out  of  it,  although  not  one  of  them 
was  undertaken  without  some  reference  to  him ;  the  success  of 
this,  the  failure  of  that,  brought  him  nearer,  put  him  farther 
away,  like  the  children's  game  of  Warm  and  Cold. 

When  she  ran  out  of  occupations  that  could  absorb  the  con 
scious  part  of  her  mind,  she  did  not  even  try  to  resist  direct 
thoughts  about  him.  She'd  spent  uncounted  hours  since  that 
opening  night,  wondering  if  he  knew  where  she  was,  invent 
ing  reasons  why,  knowing,  he  didn't  come  to  her;  explana 
tions  of  the  possibility  of  his  still  remaining  in  ignorance. 
She'd  gone  over  and  over  again,  the  probable  things  that  he 
would  say,  the  things  that  she  would  say  in  reply,  when  he 
did  come. 

She  was  prepared  for  his  anger.  He  was,  she  felt,  entitled 
to  be  angry.  But  she  felt  sure  she  could  get  him  to  listen 
while  she  told  him  just  why  and  how  she  had  done  it,  and 
what  she  had  done,  and  she  had  a  sort  of  tremulous  confidence 


406  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

that  when  the  story  was  told,  entire,  his  anger  would  be  found 
to  have  abated,  if  not  altogether  to  have  disappeared.  And 
afterward,  when  the  shock  had  worn  off,  and  he  had  had  time 
to  adjust  himself  to  things,  he'd  begin  to  feel  a  little  proud  of 
her.  They  could  commence — being  friends.  She'd  con 
structed  and  let  her  mind  dwell  on  almost  every  conceivable 
combination  of  circumstances,  except  the  one  thing  that  hap 
pened. 

Only,  as  the  active  actual  half  of  her  life  grew  more  dis 
couraging,  harder  to  steer  toward  any  object  that  seemed 
worth  attaining,  her  imaginary  life  with  Eodney  lost  its  grip 
on  fact  and  reason;  became  roseate,  romantic,  a  thinner  and 
more  iridescent  bubble,  readier  to  burst  and  disappear  alto 
gether  at  an  ungentle  touch. 

So  you  will  understand,  I  think,  that  the  Eose,  who  incred 
ulously  heard  him  ask  in  that  dull  sullen  tone,  if  she  had  any 
thing  besides  what  would  go  into  her  trunk ;  the  Eose  who  got 
up  and  turned  on  the  light  for  a  look  at  him  in  the  hope  that 
the  evidence  of  her  eyes  would  belie  that  of  her  ears ;  the  Eose 
he  left  shuddering  at  the  window  in  that  quilted  dressing- 
gown,  was  not  the  Eose  who  had  left  him  three  months  before 
and  rented  that  three-dollar  room  and  wrung  a  job  out  of 
Galbraith ! 

Dimly  she  was  aware  of  this  herself.  At  her  best  she 
wouldn't  have  lost  her  head,  wouldn't  have  flown  to  pieces 
like  that.  If  she'd  kept  any  sort  of  grip  on  the  situation, 
she  might  at  least  have  averted  a  total  shipwreck.  She  under 
stood  even  on  that  gray  morning,  that  the  terrible  things 
he'd  said  to  her  had  been  a  mere  outcry;  the  expression  of  a 
mood  she  had  encountered  before,  though  this  was  an  extreme 
example  of  it. 

But  it  was  a  long  time  before  she  went  any  further  than 
that.  The  memory  of  the  whole  episode  from  the  moment 
when  he  came  up  to  her  there  in  the  alley  and  took  her  by  the 
shoulders,  until  he  closed  her  door  upon  himself  four  hours  or 
so  later,  was  so  exquisitely  painful  that  any  reasoned  analysis 
of  it,  any  construction  of  potential  alternatives  to  the  thing 
that  had  happened,  was  simply  impossible.  The  misgiving 


IN    FLIGHT  4Q7 

that  with  a  little  more  courage  and  patience  on  her  part,  it 
might  have  terminated  differently,  only  added  to  her  misery. 

She  felt  like  a  coward  when  she  went  to  Goldsmith  and  de 
manded  to  be  sent  out  on  the  road,  and  she  experienced  for  a 
while,  the  utter  demoralization,  of  cowardice.  The  logic  of 
the  situation  told  her  to  stay  where  she  was.  If  it  were  true, 
as  she  had  fiercely  told  him  that  night,  that  their  life  together 
was  ended,  the  whole  fabric  that  they  had  woven  for  them 
selves  rent  clean  across,  then  the  only  thing  for  her  to  do  was 
to  begin  living  now,  as  she  had  made  an  effort  to  do  before, 
quite  without  reference  to  him,  ordering  her  own  existence  as 
if  he  had  ceased  to  exist;  stick  to  whatever  offered  herself, 
Doris  Dane,  the  best  chance  for  success  and  advancement. 
She  was,  of  course,  seriously  injuring  Doris  Dane's  chances 
by  going  out  on  the  road. 

And,  even  with  reference  to  Rodney,  it  was  hard  to  see  how 
her  flight  could  help  the  situation.  If  what  she'd  done  had 
really  disgraced  him  in  his  own  eyes  and  in  those  of  his  world, 
the  disgrace  was  already  complete.  Acquiescing  in  that  point 
of  view,  as  by  her  flight  she  did,  couldn't  lighten  it. 

But  all  the  power  these  considerations  had,  was  to  make  her 
flight  seem  more  ignominious.  They  were  utterly  incapable 
of  preventing  it. 

A  disinterested  friend,  had  she  boasted  such  a  possession 
just  then,  might  have  pointed  out  for  her  comfort,  that  her 
rout  was  not  complete.  It  was  a  retreat,  but  not  a  surrender. 
She  hadn't  become  Eose  Stanton  again  and  gone  back  to  Por 
tia  and  her  mother.  Doris  Dane,  though  badly  battered,  was 
still  intact ! 

The  first  ten  days  of  her  life  on  the  road  had,  on  the  whole, 
a  distinctly  restorative  effect.  I  have  never  heard  of  a  physi 
cian's  recommending  a  course  of  one-night  stands  as  a  rest 
cure  to  nervously  exhausted  patients,  but  I  am  inclined  to 
think  the  idea  has  its  merits,  for  all  that.  Certainly  the 
regime  was,  for  a  while,  beneficial  to  Eose.  The  merit  of  it 
was  that  it  offered  some  sort  of  occupation  for  practically  all 
her  time. 

A  typical  day  consisted  in  getting  up  in  the  morning  at  an 


408  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

hour  determined  for  you  either  by  the  call  posted  on  the  bul 
letin  board  in  the  theater  the  night  before,  telling  you  what 
time  you  were  to  be  at  the  railway  station,  or  by  the  last  mo 
ment  at  which  you  could  get  into  the  dining-room  in  the 
hotel.  You  ate  all  you  could  manage  at  breakfast,  because 
lunch  was  likely  to  consist  of  a  sandwich  and  an  orange 
bought  from  the  train  butcher ;  with  perhaps  the  lucky  addi 
tion  of  a  cup  of  coffee  at  some  junction  point  where  you 
changed  trains.  You  lugged  your  suit-case  down  to  the  sta 
tion,  and  had  your  arrival  there  noted  by  the  manager,  who, 
of  course,  bought  all  the  tickets  for  the  company.  You  needn't 
even  bother  to  know  where  you  were  going,  except  out  of  idle 
curiosity.  The  train  came  along  and  you  got  a  zeat  by  your 
self  on  the  shady  side,  if  you  could;  though  the  men  being 
more  agile,  generally  got  there  first. 

The  convention  of  giving  precedence  to  the  ladies,  Rose 
promptly  discovered,  and  with  a  sort  of  satisfaction,  did  not 
apply.  Indeed,  all  the  automatic  small  courtesies  and  services 
which,  in  any  life  she'd  known,  men  had  been  expected  to 
show  to  women,  were  here  completely  barred.  A  girl  could 
let  a  man  come  up  to  her  on  a  platform  where  they  were 
all  gathered  waiting  for  the  train,  and  casually  slide  an  arm 
around  her,  without  any  one's  paying  the  slightest  attention 
to  the  act.  But  if,  when  the  train  came  along,  she  permitted 
him  to  pick  up  her  suit-case,  carry  it  into  the  train  and  find 
a  seat  for  her,  there  would  be  nods  and  glances. 

Well,  you  got  into  the  train  and  dozed  and  read  a  magazine 
(or  both)  and  by  and  by,  when  everybody  else  did,  you  got  up 
and  got  out.  Perhaps  you  waited  on  a  triangular  railway 
platform  for  another  train,  or  perhaps  you  trailed  along  in  a 
procession,  to  a  hotel.  In  the  latter  case,  you  got  a  meal  and 
found  out  where  the  opera-house  was. 

There  were  various  minor  occupations  that  you  slipped  into 
the  interstices  of  a  day  like  this  whenever  they  happened 
to  come.  You  combed  out  and  brushed  your  hair  (a  hundred 
strokes)  which  you  were  too  tired  to  do  at  night  after  the  per 
formance  and  seldom  waked  up  in  time  for  in  the  morning. 
And,  if  you  were  wise,  as  Rose  was,  thanks  to  a  tip  from 


IN    FLIGHT  409 

Anabel,  and  had  emancipated  yourself  from  the  horror  of 
overnight  laundries  by  providing  yourself  with  crepe  under 
clothes  and  dark  little  silk  blouses,  you  got  all  the  hot  water 
you  could  beg  of  the  chambermaid,  and  did  the  family  wash 
in  the  bowl  in  your  room,  on  an  afternoon  when  you  had  a 
short  jump  and  there  was  no  matinee. 

It  was  a  life,  of  course,  that  abounded  in  what  pass  for 
hardships.  There  is  no  desolation  to  surpass  that  of  the  sec 
ond-best  hotel  (rates  two  dollars  a  day),  in  a  small  middle 
western  city,  except  the  same  kind  of  hotel  in  the  same  sort  of 
cit}r  in  the  South.  Bad  air,  bad  beds  and  bad  food  are  their 
staples  and  what  passes  for  service  seems  especially  calculated 
to  encourage  the  victim  to  dispense  with  it  as  far  as  possible. 
The  stages  and  dressing-rooms  in  the  theaters  were  almost  al 
ways  dirty  and  were  frequently  overrun  with  rats.  It  was 
always  cold  and  drafty  back  there,  except  Avhen  it  happened  to 
be  suffocating.  Also,  the  day's  work  by  no  means  invariably 
concluded  with  even  a  half  a  bed  in  a  two-dollar-a-day  hotel. 
If  there  happened  to  be  a  train  coming  along  at  two  o'clock  in 
the  morning,  and  also  happened  to  be  a  chance  to  play  a  mati 
nee  in  the  town  you  were  jumping  to,  you  took  your  suit-case 
to  the  theater,  lugged  it  from  there  after  the  performance,  to 
the  station,  and  spent  an  indefinite  number  of  hours  there 
after,  in  an  air-tight  waiting-room.  Waiting,  be  it  observed, 
for  a  chance  to  curl  up  in  a  seat  in  the  day-coach,  when  the 
train  came  along. 

But  Rose  didn't  mind  this  very  much.  The  rooms  assigned 
to  her  and  her  roommate  were  fully  as  comfortable  as  the 
one  she  had  lived  in  on  Clark  Street,  and  the  meals,  as  a 
whole,  were  rather  better  than  those  her  habitual  lunch-room 
had  provided.  As  for  riding  on  the  train:  it  gave  you  the 
sense  of  doing  something  and  getting  somewhere,  without  im 
posing  the  necessity  either  for  judgment  or  for  resolution. 
The  real  discomforts  to  Eose  were  not  the  material  ones. 

The  piece  had  been,  as  she  discovered  during  the  one  re 
hearsal  she  had  attended  in  Chicago,  deliberately  cheapened 
and  vulgarized  for  the  road.  The  only  one  of  the  principals 
who  had  a  shred  of  professional  reputation,  was  a  comedian 


410  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

named  Mar  Webber,  who  played  the  part  of  the  cosmetic  king. 
He'd  come  up  in  vaudeville  and  his  methods  reeked  of  it.  He 
was  featured  in  the  billing  and  he  arrogated  all  the  privileges 
of  a  real  star.  He  was  intensely  and  destructively  jealous  of 
any  approbation  he  didn't  himself  arouse,  even  if  it  was  mani 
fested  when  he  was  not  on  the  stage.  He  distended  his  part 
out  of  all  reasonable  semblance,  and  to  the  practical  annihila 
tion  of  the  plot,  by  the  injection  into  it  of  musty  vaudeville 
specialties  of  his,  which  he  assured  the  weak-kneed  manage 
ment  were  knock-outs.  And  his  clowning  and  mugging  made 
it  impossible  to  play  a  legitimate  scene  with  him,  with  any 
shadow  of  professional  self-respect. 

The  result  of  this  was  that  the  girl  who  had  rehearsed  Pa 
tricia  Devereux's  part,  an  ambitious,  well-equipped  young 
woman  who  would  have  added  much-needed  strength  to  the 
cast,  delivered  an  ultimatum  during  the  last  rehearsal  but 
one,  and  on  having  her  very  reasonable  demands  rejected, 
walked  out.  Olga  Larson,  who  had  understudied  Patricia 
ever  since  the  Chicago  opening,  was  given  the  part.  The  rest 
of  the  principals  were  either  pathetic  failures  with  lamentable 
stories  of  better  days,  or  promising  youngsters,  like  Olga  her 
self,  with  no  adequate  training. 

The  chorus  was  similarly  constituted.  There  were  fifteen 
girls  in  it,  including  the  sextette,  now  a  trio,  part  of  them 
worn-out  veterans  (one  of  these  was  the  duchess — do  you  re 
member  her  ? — who  had  applied  to  Galbraith  for  a  job  the  day 
that  Eose  got  hers)  and  the  others  green  young  girls,  not 
more  than  sixteen  or  seventeen,  some  of  them,  who  had  never 
been  on  the  stage  before.  It  was  one  of  these,  a  tiny,  slim, 
black-haired  little  thing,  who  gave  her  name  as  Dolly  Darling, 
but  hadn't  memorized  it  yet  herself,  obviously  a  runaway  in 
quest  of  romantic  adventure,  whom  Eose  adopted  as  a  per 
manent  roommate. 

Her  doing  so  opened  up  the  breach  between  herself  and 
Olga  Larson.  It  had  existed,  beneath  the  surface,  ever  since 
the  night  she  had  gone  to  supper  with  Galbraith.  It  wasn't 
that  Olga  believed  Eose  had  taken  Galbraith  as  a  lover.  She 
hadn't  believed  that  even  when  she  hurled  the  accusation 


IN   FLIGHT  411 

against  her.  The  wounding  thing  was  that  Rose  seemed  not 
to  care  whether  she  believed  it  or  not ;  had  met  her  tempestu 
ous  pleas  for  forgiveness  and  her  offers  of  unlimited  love  and 
faith  "whatever  Eose  might  do  and  however  things  might 
look,"  with  a  cold  distaste  that  hardly  differed  from  the  feel 
ing  she  had  shown  in  response  to  the  tempest  of  angry  accusa 
tion.  She  told  Olga,  to  be  sure,  that  everything  was  all  right ; 
that  the  thing  for  both  of  them  to  do,  was  to  treat  the  quarrel 
as  if  it  hadn't  occurred. 

This  wasn't  what  Olga  wanted  at  all.  She  wanted  Eose  as 
an  emotional  objective,  to  love  passionately  and  be  jealous  of, 
and,  for  a  moment  now  and  then,  hate,  as  a  preliminary  to 
another  passionate  reconciliation. 

Rose  had  divined  that  this  was  so.  Indeed,  she  understood 
it  far  better  than  Olga  did,  having  had  to  evade  one  or  two 
"crushes"  of  a  similar  sort  while  she  was  at  the  university. 
It  was  a  sort  of  thing  that  went  utterly  against  her  instincts, 
and  she  was  secretly  glad  that  the  quarrel  on  the  opening 
night  had  given  her  a  method  of  resisting  this  one  that  need 
not  seem  too  utterly  heartless. 

Since  the  quarrel,  Olga  had  been  distant  and  dignified. 
She  had  a  grievance  (that  Eose,  pretending  to  forgive  her 
confessed  mistake,  had  really  not  done  so)  but  she  was  bear 
ing  it  bravely.  Eose,  when  she  could  manage  the  manner,  was 
good-humored  and  casual,  and  completely  blind  to  the  exist 
ence  of  the  grievance  Olga  so  nobly  concealed.  But  Olga's 
wonderful  good  fortune,  coming  quite  unheralded  as  it  did, 
an  advancement  she  had  played  with  in  her  day-dreams,  and 
never  thought  of  as  a  realizable  possibility,  swept  her  out  of 
her  pose  and  carried  her  with  a  rush  into  Eose's  arms. 

This  happened  not  a  quarter  of  an  hour  after  Eose  had  se 
cured  Goldsmith's  consent  to  her  own  transfer  to  the  Number 
Two  company,  and  the  first  thing  that  registered  on  her  mind 
was  that  she,  who  had  taught  Olga  to  talk,  saved  her  her  job, 
prevailed  on  Galbraith  to  dress  her  properly,  and  won  her  a 
chance  for  the  space  of  that  one  song  refrain,  to  make  her  in 
dividual  appeal  to  the  audience — Eose,  who  had  done  all  this, 
was  now  going  out  as  a  chorus-girl  in  the  company  of  which 


412  THE    REAL   ADVEXTURE 

Olga  was  the  leading  woman.  She  didn't  regret  Olga's  pro 
motion,  but  she  did  wish,  for  herself,  that  she  might  have 
been  spared  just  now,  this  ironic  little  cackle  of  laughter  on 
the  part  of  the  malicious  Goddess  of  Chance. 

She  was  ashamed  of  the  feeling — was  she  getting  as  small 
as  that  ? — and,  in  consequence,  she  congratulated  Olga  a  good 
deal  more  warmly  than  otherwise  she  would  have  done.  But 
this  warmer  manner  of  hers  opened  Olga's  flood-gates  so  wide, 
swamped  her  in  such  a  torrent  of  sentiment,  that  Rose  simply 
took  to  flight. 

There  was  an  element  of  real  maternal  pity  in  Rose's  adop 
tion  of  little  Dolly  Darling  as  her  chum.  Dolly  was  obviously 
as  fragile  and  ephemeral  as  a  transparent  sand-fly.  She  had 
nothing  that  you  could  call  a  mind  or  a  character,  even  of  the 
most  rudimentary  sort.  She  knew  nothing,  except  how  to 
dance,  and  she  knew  that  exactly  as  a  kitten  knows  how  to 
play  with  a  ball  of  string;  she  dreamed  of  diamonds  and  won 
derful  restaurants  and  a  sardonic  hero  nine  feet  tall  with  a 
straight  nose  and  a  long  chin,  who  would  clutch  her  passion 
ately  in  his  arms  (there  was  no  more  real  passion  in  her  than 
there  is  in  a  soap-bubble)  and  murmur  vows  of  eternal  adora 
tion  in  her  ears. 

She  was  a  soap-bubble;  that's  the  figure  for  her;  just  an 
iridescent  reflection,  wondrously  distorted,  of  the  tawdry  life 
about  her — a  reflection,  and  then  nothing! 

But  just  the  thin  empty  frailness  of  her,  her  gaiety  in  the 
face  of  perfectly  inevitable  destruction,  appealed  to  Rose. 
She  had  Dolly  in  her  pocket  in  five  minutes,  and  before  the 
end  of  the  rehearsal,  their  treaty  was  signed  and  sealed.  They 
were  to  be  chums,  bosom  friends !  The  notion  of  it  gave  Rose 
the  most  spontaneous  smile  she'd  had  in  days;  the  first  one 
that  hadn't  had  a  bitter  quirk  in  it. 

When,  down  at  the  union  station  on  Sunday  morning,  as 
they  were  leaving,  Olga  unfolded  her  plan  that  she  and  Rose 
should  room  together,  Rose  owned  up  to  herself  that  there 
had  been  another  element  than  maternal  pity  in  her  adoption 
of  Dolly.  She'd  suspected  that  Olga  would  propose  some 
thing  of  this  sort,  and  she  had  fortified  herself  against  it. 


IN    FLIGHT  413 

Olga  was  furious,  of  course,  when  she  learned  what  Rose 
had  done,  and  accused  her,  with  a  measure  of  justice,  of  hav 
ing  done  it  to  be  rid  of  her.  If  Rose  didn't  want  to  remain 
under  this  imputation,  she  could  break  with  Dolly.  When 
Rose  refused  to  do  this,  Olga  cut  her  off  utterly ;  damned  her, 
disowned  her.  They  were  the  first  pair  in  the  company  to 
begin  not  to  speak. 

As  I  said,  the  chief  discomforts  for  Rose  in  those  first  ten 
days  on  the  road,  were  not  the  material  ones.  Olga's  absurd 
way  of  ignoring  her,  the  fact  that  she  attributed  their  quarrel, 
for  the  benefit  of  the  company,  to  Rose's  jealousy  of  her  suc 
cess;  worst  of  all,  the  fact  that  Rose  couldn't  be  sure  she 
ivasn't  jealous  of  Olga's  success,  didn't  feel  at  least,  contem 
plating  their  reversed  positions,  more  like  a  failure  than  she 
would  have  felt  had  the  original  girl  kept  the  leading  part, — 
all  this  contributed  to  a  discomfort  that  did  matter,  that  tor 
mented,  abraded,  rankled. 

It  became  the  core  of  a  sensation  that  she  had  turned  cheap 
and  shabby;  that  the  distinction,  which  with  her  first  en 
trance  into  this  life,  she  had  built  up  between  herself  and 
most  of  her  colleagues,  was  breaking  down ;  that  her  fiber  was 
coarsening,  her  fine  sensitiveness  becoming  calloused.  It 
troubled  her  that  she  should  feel  so  languid  an  indifference 
over  the  vulgarity  of  the  piece,  a  vulgarity  which,  under  Web 
ber's  infection,  grew  more  blatant  every  day. 

It  was  obvious  to  her  that  this  quality  was  destroying  what 
ever  slim  chance  for  success  they  had.  The  lines,  with  the 
new  ugly  twist  that  had  been  imparted  to  them,  might  draw 
a  half  dozen  rude  guffaws  from  different  parts  of  the  audi 
ence,  but  the  chill  disfavor  with  which  they  were  received  by 
the  rest  of  the  house,  must,  she  felt,  have  been  apparent  to 
everybody.  There  seemed,  though,  to  be  a  superstition  that  a 
laugh  was  a  sacred  thing;  something  to  be  fed  carefully  with 
more  of  the  same  thing  that  had  originally  produced  it.  This 
treatment  was  persisted  in,  despite  the  fact  that  the  audiences 
shrank  and  shriveled  and  the  box-office  receipts,  she  gathered 
from  the  gossip  of  the  company,  hung  just  about  at  the  mini 
mum  required  to  keep  them  going. 


414  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

What  troubled  her  was  her  own  apathetic  acceptance  of  it 
all.  Just  as  her  ear  seemed  to  have  grown  dull  to  the  of 
fenses  that  nightly  were  committed  against  it  on  the  stage, 
and  to  the  leering  response,  which  was  all  they  ever  got  from 
across  the  footlights,  so  her  spirit  submitted  tamely  to  the 
prospect  of  failure.  She  hardly  seemed  to  herself  the  same 
person  who  had  set  to  work  in  a  blaze  of  eager  enthusiasm,  on 
the  part  she  played  so  mechanically  now. 

She  tried  to  reassure  herself  with  the  reflection  that  the 
tour  meant  nothing  to  her,  except  as  it  fell  in  with  an  ulterior 
purpose,  and  that  it  was  actually  serving  that  purpose  well 
enough.  She'd  deliberately  turned  aside  from  the  main  chan 
nel  of  her  new  life  to  give  mind  and  soul  a  rest  they  needed. 
When  she'd  got  that  rest  and  rallied  her  courage,  she'd  take 
a  fresh  start.  She  had,  lying  safely  in  the  bank  in  Chicago, 
where  Galbraith  had  taken  her,  something  over  two  hundred 
dollars;  for  she'd  lived  thriftily  during  the  Chicago  engage 
ment  and  had  added  a  little  every  week  to  her  nest-egg  of 
profit  from  the  costuming  business.  So  she  had  enough  to  get 
her  to  New  York  and  see  her  through  the  process  of  finding  a 
new  job.  What  sort  of  job  it  would  be,  she  was  still  too  tired 
to  think,  but  she  was  sure  she  could  find  something. 

Meantime,  out  there  on  the  road,  she  was  making  no  effort 
to  save.  She  indulged  in  whatever  small  ameliorations  to 
their  daily  discomforts  her  weekly  wage  would  run  to. 

It  was  thus  that  matters  stood  with  her,  when,  with  the  rest 
of  the  company,  she  arrived  in  Dubuque  on  a  Wednesday 
morning,  with  an  hour  or  so  to  spare  before  the  matinee. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

ANTI-CLIMAX 

IT  was  a  beastly  day.  A  gusty  rain,  whipping  up  from  the 
south,  by  way  of  answer  to  the  challenge  of  a  heavy  snowfall 
the  day  before,  inflicted  a  combination  of  the  rigors  of  winter, 
with  a  debilitating,  disquieting  hint  of  spring.  The  train,  for 
which  they  had  been  routed  out  that  morning  at  seven  o'clock, 
had  been  blistering  hot  and  the  necessarily  open  windows  had 
let  in  choking  clouds  of  smoke. 

The  hotel  was  hot,  too.  Eose  and  Dolly,  as  soon  as  they  had 
registered,  went  up  to  their  room  and  washed  off  the  stains  of 
travel,  as  well  as  they  could  in  translucent  water  that  was  the 
color  of  weak  coffee.  Then  Eose,  in  a  kimono,  stretched  out 
on  the  bed  to  make  up  some  of  the  rest  their  early  departure 
from  Cedar  Eapids  had  deprived  her  of.  She  did  this  me 
thodically  whenever  opportunity  offered,  but  without  any 
great  conviction. 

Dolly,  though  she  looked  a  bit  hollow-e}red  and  much  more 
in  need  of  rest  than  Rose  (for  she  hadn't  any  stamina  at  all. 
She  was  an  under-nourished,  and  probably  anemic  little 
thing,  and  was  always  train-sick  when  their  jumps  began  too 
early  in  the  morning),  went  straight  ahead  with  her  toilet, 
tried  to  correct  her  pallor  with  a  little  too  much  rouge,  and 
with  the  glaring  falsehood  that  it  was  clearing  up,  put  on  the 
pathetic  little  fifteen-dollar  suit  that  she  religiously  guarded 
for  occasions. 

She  was  very  fidgety,  a  little  bit  furtive,  and  elaborately 
over-casual  about  all  this ;  a  fact  to  which  Eose  was,  also  a  lit 
tle  artificially,  oblivious. 

Their  partnership  had  not  proved,  from  Dolly's  point  of 
view,  at  any  rate,  an  unqualified  success.  They'd  not  been  on 
the  road  three  days  before  she'd  begun  to  wonder  whether  she 

411 


416  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

hadn't  been  hasty  in  the  selection  of  her  chum.  Doris  Dane 
was  a  very  magnificent  person,  of  course.  She  made  the  rest 
of  the  company,  including  the  principals,  look  (this  was 
a  phrase  Dolly  had  unguardedly  used  the  day  Rose  first  ap 
peared  at  rehearsal)  like  a  bunch  of  rummies.  And  of  course 
it  was  an  immense  compliment  to  be  singled  out  by  an  awe- 
inspiring  person  like  that,  for  her  particular  chum.  Only, 
once  the  compliment  had  been  paid,  its  value  as  an  abiding 
possession  became  a  little  doubtful.  Awe  is  not  a  very  com 
fortable  sort  of  emotion  to  eat  breakfast  with. 

Evidently  the  rest  of  the  company  felt  that  way  about  it, 
for  Dane  was  not  popular.  She  gave  no  handle  for  an  active 
grievance,  to  be  sure.  She  wasn't  superior  in  the  sense  in 
which  Dolly  used  the  word.  She  didn't  look  haughty  nor  say 
withering  things  to  people,  nor  tell  passionately-believed 
stories  designed  to  convince  her  hearers  that  her  rightful 
place  in  the  world  was  immensely  higher  than  the  one  she 
now  occupied.  One  didn't  hear  her  exclaiming  under  some  bit 
of  managerial  tyranny,  that  never,  in  the  course  of  her  whole 
life,  had  she  been  subjected  to  such  an  affront.  But  she  had 
a  blank,  rather  tired  way  of  keeping  silence  when  other  peo 
ple  told  stories  like  that,  or  made  protests  like  that,  which  was 
subtly  infuriating.  The  very  fact  that  she  never  tried  to  im 
press  the  company,  was  presumptive  evidence  that  the  com 
pany  didn't  very  greatly  impress  her.  If  their  common 
feeling  about  her  had  ever  crystallized  into  a  phrase,  its 
effect  would  have  been,  that  all  their  affairs,  personal  and 
professional,  past,  present  and  to  come,  even  those  she  shared 
with  them,  were  not  of  sufficient  importance  to  her  ever  to 
get  quite  the  whole  of  her  attention.  It  was  a  notion  that  irri 
tated  the  women  and  frightened  off  the  men.  Probably  noth 
ing  else  could  have  kept  a  young  woman  of  Rose's  physical  at 
tractions  from  being,  on  a  tour  like  that,  with  that  sort  of 
company,  the  object  of,  at  least,  experiments. 

Men  may  consider  these  experiments  worth  trying  in  the  face 
of  a  determined  hostility  on  the  part  of  the  subject  of  them. 
The  most  rigorous  primness  of  behavior  does  not  daunt  them, 
nor  the  assertion  of  an  icily  virtuous  intangibility.  But  the 


ANTI-CLIMAX  417 

eort  of  good-humored  preoccupation  that  doesn't  see  them 
at  all,  that  sees  the  pattern  in  the  wall-paper  behind  their 
backs,  that  tries,  half-heartedly,  to  be  adequately  courteous, 
is  too  much  for  them.  And  the  more  experienced  they  are  in 
conquests,  and  the  higher,  on  the  basis  of  their  own  experi 
ence,  they  rate  the  irresistibility  of  their  powers,  the  less  of 
this  particular  sort  of  treatment  they  can  stand.  The  mere 
sight  of  her,  after  the  first  day  or  two,  was  enough  to  give  a 
professional  "killer"  like  Max  Webber,  the  creeps. 

But  Rose's  manner  not  only  kept  the  men  away  from  her 
self.  It  kept  them  away  from  Dolly.  Poor  Dolly  didn't  know 
what  the  matter  was,  at  first. 

She  had  been  told  terrible  stories  by  her  mother  and  her 
elder  brother,  about  the  perils  that  beset  young  girls  who 
ran  away  from  good  respectable  homes.  She  had  been  told 
them  with  the  misguided  purpose  of  keeping  her  from  run 
ning  away  from  her  own  home,  which  was  no  doubt  respecta 
ble,  but  was  also  deadly  dull.  She  had  run  away  and  it  was 
perils  she  was  looking  for.  She  didn't  mean  to  succumb  to 
them.  None  of  the  heroines  of  the  only  literature  she  knew 
— of  the  movies,  that  is  to  say — succumbed  to  perils.  They 
were  beset  by  the  most  terrific  perils.  It  was  over  perils  that 
they  climbed  to  soul-entrancing  heights  of  romance.  It  was 
because  they  were  the  almost  certain  victims  of  diabolical 
machinations,  that  wonderful  heroes,  with  long  eyelashes 
and  curly  hair,  came  to  their  rescue  and  clasped  them  in  their 
arms  and  looked  unutterable  things  into  their  eyes,  just  as  the 
picture  faded  out. 

Dolly  had  joined  the  chorus  of  a  musical  comedy,  because 
that  profession  offered  more  alluring  wares  in  the  way  of 
perils  than  any  other  that  was  open  to  her.  And  then  she 
discovered  that  her  calculations  had  gone  awry.  The  im 
palpable  shield  her  formidable  friend  carried  with  her,  turned 
the  perils  aside.  The  little  group  of  half- grown  boys  one 
sometimes  found  waiting  at  the  stage  door,  never  even  spoke 
to  Rose,  and  Dolly,  in  her  company,  partook  of  this  unwel- 
comed  immunity.  As  for  the  men  in  the  company,  Dolly 
found  them  letting  her  entirely  alone. 


418  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

She  was  bitterly  unhappy  at  first  about  this,  taking  it  as 
an  indication  of  the  insufficiency  of  her  charms.  But  once 
she  got  the  clue,  she  set  about  righting  matters.  She  began 
taking  tentative  little  strolls  about  the  hotel  lobbies  by  her 
self,  and  on  her  train  journeys,  when  the  motion  and  the 
odor  of  the  men's  pipes  didn't  make  her  too  sick,  she'd  kneel 
upon  a  seat  and  look  over  the  back  of  it  into  one  of  the  per 
petual  poker-games  they  used  to  pass  the  time.  It  was  aston 
ishing  how  quickly  she  got  results. 

She  wandered  over  to  the  cigar-stand  at  one  of  their  hotels, 
one  afternoon,  a  week  before  the  arrival  in  Dubuque,  to  look 
at  a  rack  of  picture  postcards.  One  of  the  chorus-men  came 
over  to  buy  some  cigarettes.  She  felt  him  look  at  her,  and  she 
felt  herself  flush  a  little.  And  then  he  came  a  step  closer  to 
look  at  the  postcards  for  himself,  and  sighed  and  said  he 
wished  he  had  somebody  to  send  postcards  to.  He  supposed 
she  sent  him  one  every  day.  Whereupon  Dolly  said  she 
wasn't  going  to  send  him,  one  to-day,  anyway.  They  strolled 
across  the  lobby  together  and  sat  down  in  two  of  the  wide- 
armed  unsatisfactory  chairs  they  have  at  such  places;  chairs 
that  kept  them  so  far  apart  they  had  to  shout  at  each  other. 
So,  after  a  few  minutes,  it  being  a  fine  day,  he  suggested  they 
go  out  for  a  walk.  She  had  on  her  outdoor  wraps  and  hia 
overcoat  lay  across  a  chair. 

She  had  already  nodded  acquiescence  to  his  proposal,  when 
she  saw  Rose  coming  in  through  the  door. 

"Wait,"  she  whispered  to  him.  "Don't  come  out  with  me. 
I'll  wait  outside."  And  with  that  she  walked  up  to  Rose  and 
told  her  she  was  going  out  to  get  some  cold  cream. 

Five  per  cent.,  perhaps,  of  the  motive  that  prompted  this 
maneuver,  was  what  it  pretended  to  be,  a  fear  of  Rose's  dis 
approbation  and  a  wish  to  avoid  it.  The  other  ninety-five 
per  cent,  of  it  was  just  instinctive  love  of  intrigue. 

The  chorus-boy  waited,  blankly  wooden  enough  to  have  at 
tracted  the  suspicion  of  any  eye  less  preoccupied  than  Rose's, 
until  she  had  got  around  the  curve  of  the  stair.  Then,  joining 
Dolly  on  the  pavement,  he  demanded  to  be  told  what  it  was 
all  about. 


ANTI-CLIMAX  419 

Dolly,  making  up  her  little  mystery  as  she  went  along,  and 
making  herself  more  interesting  at  every  step,  told  him.  They 
took  a  long  walk,  and  by  the  time  they  got  back  to  the  hotel, 
they  were  in  love.  But  they  were  separated  by  the  malign  in 
fluence  of  Dolly's  friend.  They  developed  a  code  of  signals 
for  circumventing  her  watchful  eye.  They  slipped  unsigned 
notes  to  each  other. 

So  Dolly,  on  this  blustering  morning  in  Dubuque,  fidgeting 
about  the  room,  thinking  up  a  perfectly  unnecessary  excuse 
for  going  out,  to  give  to  Eose,  answered  a  knock  at  the  door 
very  promptly  and  took  the  folded  bit  of  paper  the  bell-boy 
handed  her,  without  listening  to  what  he  said,  if  indeed  he 
said  anything  at  all  to  her. 

She  carried  it  over  to  the  window,  turned  her  back  to  Eose, 
unfolded  the  bit  of  paper  and  read  it ;  read  it  again,  frowned 
in  a  puzzled  way,  and  said : 

"I  didn't  know  there  was  anybody  in  the  company  named 
Eodney." 

"What's  his  last  name?"  asked  Eose.  There  was  nothing 
in  her  tone  that  challenged  Dolly's  attention,  though  the 
quality  of  it  would  have  caught  a  finer  ear.  And  even  if  Dolly 
had  looked  up,  she'd  have  seen  nothing.  Eose  lay  there  just 
as  she  had  been  lying  a  moment  ago.  It  would  have  needed 
a  better  observer  than  Dolly  to  see  that  she  had  stopped 
breathing. 

"There  ain't  any  last  name,"  said  Dolly.  "He  seems  to 
think  I'll  know  him  by  the  first  one."  It  pleased  Dolly  to 
make  a  parade  of  frankness  about  this  note.  She  couldn't  be 
sure  Eose  had  been  as  oblivious  as  she  seemed,  to  those  the 
chorus-man  had  been  sending  her.  This,  to  her  rudimentary 
mind,  seemed  a  good  opportunity  to  allay  Dane's  suspicions. 
"See  if  you  can  make  anything  out  of  it,"  she  said,  and 
handed  it  over  to  Eose. 

Eose  got  up  off  the  bed  and  carried  the  note  to  the  win 
dow.  She  stood  there  with  it  a  long  time. 

"What's  the  matter?"  said  Dolly.  "Can't  you  read  his 
writing  ?" 

"Yes,"  said  Eose.    "I  know  who  he  is.    It's  meant  for  me." 


420  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

The  tone,  though  barely  audible,  was  automatic.  It  brushed 
Dolly  away  as  if  she  had  been  a  buzzing  fly,  and  she  felt  dis 
tinctly  aggrieved  by  it.  That  Dane,  with  all  her  loftily  as 
sumed  indifference  to  men,  even  to  a  star  like  Mai  Webber, 
should  get  a  note  like  that,  and  should  have  the  nerve  to  be 
tray  no  confusion  over  having  her  pretense  thus  confounded ! 
Dolly  had  read  the  note  thoroughly,  and  it  had  struck  her  as 
cryptic  and  suggestive  in  the  extreme. 

"I  want  to  see  you  very  much,"  it  said,  "and  shall  wait  in 
the  lobby  unless  you  say  impossible.  I'll  submit  to  any  condi 
tions  you  wish  to  make.  No  bad  news/* 

It  sounded  like  a  code  to  Dolly. 

Rose  stood  there  a  long  time.  When  she  turned  around, 
Dolly  saw  she  was  pale.  She'd  crumpled  the  note  tight  in  one 
palm,  and  her  hands  were  trembling.  Then,  with  great  swift 
ness,  she  began  to  dress.  But  though  her  haste  was  evident, 
she  didn't  ask  Dolly  to  help  her ;  didn't  seem  to  know,  indeed, 
that  she  was  in  the  room.  It  was  no  way  for  a  friend  to  act ! 

The  thing  that  had  moved  Rose  to  an  extent  that  terrified 
her  was  that  last  phrase.  The  desire  it  showed  to  play  fair 
with  her;  the  unwillingness  to  take  advantage  of  a  fear  his 
coming  like  that  might  have  inspired  her  with.  And  then 
the  way  he  had  made  it  possible  for  her,  with  a  single  word, 
to  send  him  away !  And  the  restraint  of  that  "I  want  to  see 
you  very  much !"  It  wasn't  like  any  Rodney  she  knew,  to  be 
humble  like  that.  His  humility  stripped  her  of  her  armor.  If 
he'd  been  imperious,  exigeant,  she  could  have  gone  down  to 
meet  him  with  her  head  up.  Suppose  she  found  him  broken, 
aged,  with  a  dumb  need  for  her  crying  out  in  his  eyes,  what 
would  she  do?  What  could  she  trust  herself  not  to  do?  But 
just  in  human  mercy  to  him  she  mustn't  let  him  see  she  was 
wavering. 

The  Rose  he  was  waiting  for,  there  in  the  lobby,  the  only 
Rose  he  had  been  able  to  picture  to  himself  for  more  than  a 
fortnight  of  distressful  days,  was  the  Rose  he'd  last  seen  in 
that  North  Clark  Street  room ;  the  Rose  with  a  look  of  dumb 
frozen  agony  in  her  face.  The  one  idea  he'd  clung  to  since 
starting  for  Dubuque,  had  been  that  he  mustn't  frighten  her. 


ANTI-CLIMAX  421 

She  must  see,  with  her  first  glance  at  him,  that  she  had 
nothing  to  fear  from  a  repetition  of  his  former  behavior.  She 
must  see  that  the  brute  in  him — that  was  the  way  he  put  it 
to  himself — was  completely  tamed. 

Their  meeting  was  a  shock  to  both  of  them;  an  incredible 
mocking  sort  of  anti-climax. 

lie  was  standing  near  the  foot  of  the  stairs  when  she  came 
down,  with  a  raincoat  on,  and  a  newspaper  twisted  up  in  his 
hands,  and  at  sight  of  her,  he  took  off  his  soft  wet  hat,  and 
crunched  it  up  along  with  the  newspaper.  He  moved  over 
toward  her,  but  stopped  two  or  three  feet  away.  "It's  very 
good  of  you  to  come,"  he  said,  his  voice  lacking  a  little  of  the 
ridiculous  stiffness  of  his  words,  not  much.  "Is  there  some 
place  where  we  can  talk  a  little  more — privately  than  here? 
I  shan't  keep  you  long." 

"There's  a  room  here  somewhere,"  she  said.  "I  noticed 
it  this  morning  when  we  came  in.  Oh,  yes !  It's  over  there." 

The  room  she  led  him  to,  was  an  appropriately  preposterous 
setting  for  the  altogether  preposterous  talk  that  ensued  be 
tween  them.  It  had  a  mosaic  floor  with  a  red  plush  carpet 
on  it,  two  stained  glass  windows  in  yellow  and  green,  flanking 
an  oak  mantel,  which  framed  an  enormous  expanse  of  mottled 
purple  tile,  with  a  diminutive  gas  log  in  the  middle.  A 
glassy  looking  oak  table  occupied  most  of  the  room,  and  the 
chairs  that  were  crowded  in  around  it  were  upholstered  in 
highly  polished  coffee-colored  horse-hide,  with  very  ornate 
nails.  A  Moorish  archway  with  a  spindling  grill  across  the 
top,  gave  access  to  it.  The  room  served,  doubtless,  to  gratify 
the  proprietor's  passion  for  beauty.  The  flagrant  impossibility 
of  its  serving  any  other  purpose,  had  preserved  it  in  its  pris 
tine  splendor.  One  might  imagine  that  no  one  had  ever  been 
in  there,  barring  an  occasional  awed  maid  with  a  dust  cloth, 
until  Rodney  and  Rose  descended  on  it. 

"It's  dreadfully  hot  in  here,"  Rose  said.  "You'd  better 
take  off  your  coat."  She  squeezed  in  between  the  table  and 
one  of  the  chairs,  and  seated  herself. 

Rodney  threw  down  his  wet  hat,  his  newspaper,  and  then 
his  raincoat,  on  the  table,  and  slid  into  a  chair  opposite  her. 


422  THE    EEAL    ADVEXTUEE 

If  only  one  of  them  could  have  laughed !  But  the  situation 
was  much  too  tragic  for  that. 

"I  want  to  tell  you  first,"  Eodney  said,  and  his  manner  was 
that  of  a  schoolboy  reciting  to  his  teacher  an  apology  that 
has  been  rehearsed  at  home  under  the  sanction  of  paternal 
authority,  "I  want  to  tell  you  how  deeply  sorry  I  am  for 
.  .  .  I  want  to  say  that  you  can't  be  any  more  horrified 
over  what  I  did — that  night  than  I  am." 

He  had  his  newspaper  in  his  hands  again  and  was  twisting 
it  up.  His  eyes  didn't  once  seek  her  face.  But  they  might 
have  done  so  in  perfect  safety,  because  her  own  were  fixed  on 
his  hands  and  the  newspaper  they  crumpled. 

He  didn't  presume  to  ask  her  forgiveness,  he  told  her.  He 
couldn't  expect  that;  at  least  not  at  present.  He  went  on 
lamely,  in  broken  sentences,  repeating  what  he'd  said,  in  still 
more  inadequate  words.  He  was  unable  to  stop  talking  until 
she  should  say  something,  it  hardly  mattered  what.  And  she 
was  unable  to  say  anything.  There  was  a  reason  for  this : 

The  thing  that  had  amazed  her  by  crowding  up  into  her 
mind,  demanding  to  be  said,  was  that  she  forgave  him  utterly 
— if  indeed  she  had  anything  more  to  forgive  than  he. 
She'd  never  thought  it  before,  Now  she  realized  that  it  was 
true.  He  was  as  guiltless  of  premeditation  on  that  night  as 
she.  If  he  had  yielded  to  a  rush  of  passion,  even  while  his 
other  instincts  felt  outraged  by  the  things  she  had  done, 
hadn't  she  yielded  too,  without  ever  having  tried  to  tell  him 
certain  material  facts  that  might  change  his  feeling?  They'd 
both  been  victims,  if  one  cared  to  put  it  like  that,  of  an  acci 
dent;  had  ventured,  incautiously,  into  the  rim  of  a  whirl 
pool  whose  irresistible  force  they  both  knew. 

She  fought  the  realization  down  with  a  frantic  repression. 
It  wasn't — it  couldn't  be  true!  Why  hadn't  she  seen  it  was 
true  before  ?  Why  must  the  reflection  have  come  at  a  moment 
like  this,  while  he  sat  there,  across  the  table  from  her  in  a 
public  room,  laboriously  apologizing? 

The  formality  of  his  phrases  got  stiffer  and  finally  congealed 
into  a  blank  silence. 
,     Finally  she  said,  with  a  gasp:     "I  have  something  to  a^k 


ANTI-CLIMAX  423 

you  to — forgive  me  for.  That's  for  leaving  you  to  find  out — 
where  I  was,  the  way  you  did.  You  see,  I  thought  at  first 
that  no  one  would  know  me,  made  up  and  all.  And  when  I 
found  out  I  would  be  recognizable,  it  was  too  late  to  stop — 
or  at  least  it  seemed  so.  Besides,  I  thought  you  knew.  I 
saw  Jimmy  Wallace  out  there  the  opening  night,  and  saw 
he  recognized  me,  and — I  thought  he'd  tell  you.  And  then 
I  kept  seeing  other  people  out  in  front  after  that,  people  we 
knew,  who'd  come  to  see  for  themselves,  and  I  thought,  of 
course,  you  knew.  And — I  suppose  I  was  a  coward — I  waited 
for  you  to  come.  I  wasn't,  as  you  thought,  trying  to  hurt 
you.  But  I  can  see  how  it  must  have  looked  like  that/' 

He  said  quickly:  "You're  not  to  blame  at  all.  I  remember 
how  you  offered  to  tell  me  what  you  intended  to  do  before  you 
went  away,  and  that  I  wouldn't  let  you." 

Silence  froze  down  on  them  again. 

"I  can't  forgive  myself,"  he  said  at  last,  "for  having  driven 
you  out — as  I'm  sure  I  did — from  your  position  in  the  Chi 
cago  company.  I  went  back  to  the  theater  to  try  and  find 
you,  three  days  after — after  that  night,  but  you  were  gone. 
I've  been  trying  to  find  you  ever  since.  I've  wanted  to  take 
back  the  things  I  said  that  night — about  being  disgraced  and 
all.  I  was  angry  over  not  having  known  when  the  other 
people  did.  It  wasn't  your  being  on  the  stage.  We're  not  so 
bigoted  as  that. 

"I've  come  to  ask  a  favor  of  you,  though,  and  that  is  that 
you'll  let  me — let  us  all,  help  you.  I  can't — bear  having  you 
live  like  this,  knocking  about  like  this,  where  all  sorts  of 
things  can  happen  to  you.  And  going  under  an  assumed 
name.  I've  no  right  to  ask  a  favor,  I  know,  but  I  do.  I  ask 
you  to  take  your  own  name  again,  Rose  Aldrich.  And  I  want 
you  to  let  us  help  you  to  get  a  better  position  than  this ;  that 
is,  if  you  haven't  changed  your  mind  about  being  on  the 
stage ;  a  position  that  will  have  more  hope  and  promise  in  it. 
I  want  you  to  feel  that  we're — with  you." 

"Who  are  'we'?"  She  accompanied  that  question  with  a 
straight  look  into  his  eyes;  the  first  since  they  had  sat  down 
across  this  table. 


424  THE   EEAL   ADVENTTJEE 

"Why,"  he  said,  "the  only  two  people  I've  talked  with 
about  it — Frederica  and  Harriet.  I  thought  you'd  be  glad  to 
know  that  they  felt  as  I  did." 

The  first  flash  of  genuine  feeling  she  had  shown,  was  the 
one  that  broke  through  on  her  repetition  of  the  name 
"Harriet!" 

"Yes,"  he  said,  and  he  had,  for  about  ten  seconds,  the  mis 
guided  sense  of  dialectical  triumph.  "I  know  a  little  how  you 
feel  toward  her,  and  maybe  she's  justified  it.  But  not  in  this 
case.  Because  it  was  Harriet  who  made  me  see  that  there 
wasn't  anything — disgraceful  about  your  going  on  the  stage. 
It  was  her  own  idea  that  you  ought  to  use  your  own  name 
and  give  us  a  chance  to  help  you.  She'll  be  only  too  glad  to 
help.  And  she  knows  some  people  in  New  York  who  have 
influence  in  such  matters." 

During  the  short  while  she  let  elapse  before  she  spoke,  his 
confidence  in  the  conviction-carrying  power  of  this  statement 
ebbed  somewhat,  though  he  hadn't  seen  yet  what  was  wrong 
with  it. 

"Yes,"  she  said  at  last,  "I  think  I  can  see  Harriet's  view 
of  it.  As  long  as  Eose  had  run  away  and  joined  a  fifth-rate 
musical  comedy  in  order  to  be  on  the  stage,  and  as  long  as 
everybody  knew  it,  the  only  thing  to  do  was  to  get  her  into 
something  respectable  so  that  you  could  all  pretend  you  liked 
it.  It  was  all  pretty  shabby,  of  course,  for  the  Aldriches,  and 
in  a  way,  what  you  deserved  for  marrying  a  person  like  that. 
Still,  that  was  no  reason  for  not  putting  the  best  face  on  it 
you  could. — And  that's  why  you  came  to  find  me !" 

"No,  it  isn't,"  he  said  furiously.  His  elaborately  assumed 
manner  had  broken  down,  anyway.  "I  came  because  I  couldn't 
help  coming.  I've  been  sick — sick  ever  since  that  night  over 
the  way  you  were  living,  over  the  sort  of  life  I'd — driven  you 
to.  I've  felt  I  couldn't  stand  it.  I  wanted  you  to  know  that 
I'd  assent  to  anything,  any  sort  of  terms  that  you  wanted  to 
make  that  didn't  involve — this.  If  it's  the  stage,  all  right. — 
Or  if  you'd  come  home — to  the  babies.  I  wouldn't  ask  any 
thing  for  myself.  You  could  be  as  independent  of  me  as  you 
are  here. 


ANTI-CLIMAX  425 

He'd  have  gone  on  elaborating  this  program  rather  fur 
ther  but  the  look  of  blank  incredulity  in  her  face  stopped  him. 

"I  say  things  wrong,"  he  concluded  with  a  sudden  humility 
that  quenched  the  spark  of  anger  in  her  eyes.  "I  was  a  fool 
to  quote  Harriet,  and  I  haven't  done  much  better  in  speaking 
for  myself.  I  can't  make  you  see." 

"Oh,  I  can  see  plainly  enough,  Koddy,"  she  said,  with  a 
tired  little  grimace  that  was  a  sorry  reminder  of  her  old  smile. 
"I  guess  I  see  too  well.  I'm  sorry  to  have  hurt  you  and  made 
you  miserable.  I  knew  I  was  going  to  do  that,  of  course, 
when  I  went  away,  but  I  hoped  that  after  a  while,  you'd  come 
to  see  my  side  of  it.  You  can't  at  all.  You  couldn't  believe 
that  I  was  happy  in  that  little  room  up  on  Clark  Street ;  that 
I  thought  I  was  doing  something  worth  doing ;  something  that 
was  making  me  more  nearly  a  person  you  could  respect  and 
be  friends  with.  And,  from  what  you've  said  just  now,  it 
seems  as  if  you  couldn't  believe  even  that  I  was  a  person  with 
any  decent  self-respect.  The  notion  that  I  could  blackmail 
your  family  into  lending  me  their  name  and  social  position 
to  get  me  a  better  job  on  tbe  stage  than  I  could  earn !  Or  the 
notion  that  I  could  come  back  to  your  house  and  pretend  to 
be  your  wife  without  even  .  .  . !" 

The  old  possibility  of  frank  talk  between  them  was  gone. 
She  couldn't  complete  the  sentence. 

"So  I  guess,"  she  concluded  after  a  silence,  "that  the  only 
thing  for  you  to  do  is  to  go  home  and  forget  about  me  as  well 
as  you  can  and  be  as  little  miserable  about  me  as  possible. 
I'll  tell  you  this,  that  may  make  it  a  little  easier :  you're  not 
to  think  of  me  as  starving  or  miserable,  or  even  uncomfortable 
for  want  of  money.  I'm  earning  plenty  to  live  on,  and  I've 
got  over  two  hundred  dollars  in  the  bank.  So,  on  that  score 
at  least,  you  needn't  worry." 

There  was  a  long  silence  while  he  sat  there  twisting  the 
newspaper  in  his  hands,,  his  eyes  downcast,  his  face  dull  with 
the  look  of  defeat  that  had  settled  over  it. 

In  the  security  of  his  averted  gaze,  she  took  a  long  look  at 
him.  Then,  with  a  wrench,  she  looked  away. 

"You  will  let  me  go  now,  won't  you  ?"  she  asked.    "This  is 


426  THE   KEAL   ADVENTURE 

— hard  for  us  both,  and  it  isn't  getting  us  anywhere.  And — 
and  I've  got  to  ask  you  not  to  come  back.  Because  it's  im 
possible,  I  guess,  for  you  to  see  the  thing  my  way.  You've 
done  your  best  to,  I  can  see  that." 

He  got  up  out  of  his  chair,  heavily,  tiredly;  put  on  his 
raincoat  and  stood,  for  a  moment,  crumpling  his  soft  hat  in 
his  hands,  looking  down  at  her.  She  hadn't  risen.  She'd 
gone  limp  all  at  once,  and  was  leaning  over  the  table. 

"Good-by,"  he  said  at  last. 

She  said,  "Good-by,  Roddy,"  and  watched  him  walking 
across  the  lobby  and  out  into  the  rain.  He'd  left  his  news 
paper.  She  took  it,  gripped  it  in  both  hands,  just  as  he'd 
done,  then,  with  an  effort,  got  up  and  mounted  the  stairs  to 
her  room.  Dolly,  fortunately,  had  gone  out. 

The  violent  struggle  she  had  had  to  make  during  the  last 
few  moments  in  her  effort  to  retain  her  self-control,  had 
pretty  well  exhausted  her.  Only,  had  it  been  self-control,  after 
all?  That  question  shook  her.  Had  she  meant  to  be  merci 
less  to  him  like  that;  to  send  him  away  utterly  discouraged 
in  his  sad  humility,  when  the  touch  of  an  outreached  hand 
would  have>  changed  the  whole  face  of  the  world  for  him? 
Had  she  really  been  as  noble  as  she  felt  while  she  was  defend 
ing  the  impregnable  righteousness  of  her  position  and  so 
completely  demolishing  his? 

She  remembered  a  day  when  he  had  been  beaten  in  a  law 
suit,  and  she  had  waited  for  him  to  come  to  her  in  his  dis 
couragement  for  help  and  comfort.  It  was  thus  he  had  come 
to  her  to-day.  How  helpless  he  was !  What  a  boy  he  was ! 

Her  memory  flashed  back  over  their  not  quite  two  years  of 
life  together  and  she  realized  that  he  had  always  been  like 
that  whenever  his  emotions  toward  her  came  into  play.  All 
his  finely  trained,  formidable  intelligence  had  always  de 
serted  him  here.  She  remembered  his  having  told  her,  the 
night  he'd  turned  her  out  of  his  office,  that  his  mind  had  to 
run  cold.  She  hadn't  really  known  what  he  meant.  She 
saw  now  that  her  own  mind  didn't  run  cold,  that  it  never 
really  aroused  itself  except  under  the  spur  of  strong  emotion. 
tSo  that  just  where  he  was  most  helpless,  she  was  at  her 


ANTI-CLIMAX  427 

strongest.  A  victory  over  him  in  those  circumstances,  was 
about  as  much  to  feel  triumphant  over  as  one  over  a  small 
child  would  be. 

She  realized  now,  more  fully  than  before,  what  a  crucifixion 
of  his  boyish  pride  it  must  have  been  to  see  her  on  the  stage. 
It  was  no  answer  to  say  that  with  his  intellectual  concept  of 
the  ideal  relations  between  men  and  women,  he  shouldn't 
have  felt  like  that.  Shouldn't  have  felt!  The  phrase  was 
self-contradictory.  Feelings  weren't  decorative  abstractions 
which  you  selected  according  to  your  best  moral  and  esthetic 
judgment  out  of  an  unlimited  stock,  and  ordered  wrapped 
and  sent  home.  They  were  things  that  happened  to  you.  In 
this  case,  two  violently  opposed  feelings  of  terrible  intensity 
had  happened  to  him  at  once;  had  torn  each  other,  and,  in 
their  struggle,  had  torn  him.  Justified  or  not,  it  was  her  act 
in  leaving  him,  that  had  turned  those  feelings  loose  upon 
him.  It  was  through  her  that  he  had  suffered;  that  was 
plain  enough.  It  must  have  been  terribly  plain  to  him. 

And  yet,  despite  the  suffering  she  had  caused  him,  he  had 
crucified  his  pride  again  and  come  to  find  her;  not  with  re 
proaches,  with  utter  contrition  and  humility.  The  measures 
he'd  suggested  for  easing  their  strained  situation  were,  to  be 
sure,  maddeningly  beside  the  mark.  The  fact  that  he'd  of 
fered  them  betrayed  his  complete  failure  to  understand  the 
situation.  But  it  had  cost  him,  evidently,  as  much  pain  to 
work  them  out  and  bring  them  to  her,  as  if  they  had  been  the 
real  solvents  he  took  them  for.  And  she  had  contemptuously 
torn  them  to  shreds,  and  sent  him  away  feeling  like  an  un- 
pardoned  criminal.  She  hadn't  drawn  the  stii\g  from  one 
of  the  barbs  she'd  planted  in  him,  in  her  anger,  before  he'd 
left  her  in  that  North  Clark  Street  room. 

She  didn't  blame  herself  for  the  anger,  nor  for  the  panic 
of  revulsion  that  had  excited  it.  That  was  a  feeling  that  had 
happened  to  her.  What  she  did  blame  herself  for  was  that, 
seeing  them  both  now,  as  the  victims  of  a  regrettable  acci 
dent  (did  she  really  regret  it?  Were  it  in  her  power  to  ob 
literate  the  memory  of  it  altogether,  as  a  child  with  a  wet 
sponge  can  obliterate  a  misspelled  word  from  a  slate,  would 


'4:28  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

she  do  it?  She  dismissed  that  question  unanswered.),  she  had 
allowed  him  to  go  away  with  his  burden  of  guilt  unlightened. 
She  had  done  that,  she  told  herself,  out  of  sheer  cowardice. 
She  had  been  afraid  of  impairing  the  luster  of  her  virtuously 
superior  position. 

Yet  now,  she  protested,  she  was  being  as  unfair  to  herself 
as  she  had  been  to  him.  What  sort  of  situation  would  they 
have  found  themselves  in,  had  she  confessed  her  true  new  feel 
ings  about  the  love-storm  that  had  swept  over  them,  that  night 
of  the  February  gale  ?  What  good  would  protestations  of  love 
and  sympathy  for  him  do,  if  she  had  to  go  on  denying  him  the 
tangible  evidence  and  guarantee  of  these  feelings? 

She  must  deny  them.  Could  she  go  home  to  him  now,  a 
repentant  prodigal  ?  Or  even  if,  after  hearing  her  story,  he 
denied  she  was  a  prodigal ;  professed  to  see  in  it  a  reason  for 
taking  her  fully  into  his  life  as  his  friend  and  partner  ?  They 
might  have  a  wonderful  week  together,  living  up  to  their  new 
standard,  professing  all  sorts  of  new  understandings.  But 
the  thing  wasn't  to  be  for  a  week.  It  was  for  the  rest  of  their 
lives.  She'd  never  be  able  to  feel  that,  in  the  bottom  of  his 
heart,  he  wasn't  ashamed  of  her,  as  his  world  would  say  he 
ought  to  be.  What  satisfying  guarantee  could  he  ever  give 
her. that  he  wasn't  ashamed  ?  She  couldn't  think  of  any. 

Oh,  it  was  all  hopeless!  It  didn't  matter  what  you  did. 
You  didn't  do  things,  anyway.  They  got  done  for  you — and 
to  you,  by  a  blind  force  that  masqueraded  as  your  own  will. 
The  things  she  and  Rodney  had  been  saying  to  each  other 
hadn't  been  the  things  they'd  wanted  to  say.  They'd  been 
things  wrung  out  between  the  rollers  of  a  situation  they 
hadn't  produced  and  couldn't  control. 

What  were  they,  the  pair  of  them,  but  chips  floating  down 
the  current;  thrown  together  by  one  casual  eddy,  and  parted 
by  another!  Half  an  hour  ago,  longing  for  each  other  un 
speakably,  they  had  been  within  hand's  reach.  Now,  thanks 
to  a  few  meaningless  words,  arguments,  ideas — what  was 
the  good  of  ideas  and  words  ?  Why  couldn't  they  be  like  ani 
mals? — they  were  parted  and  she  was  clutching  as  a  sole 


ANTI-CLIMAX  429 

tangible  memento  of  him,  a  rolled-up  newspaper  that  she 
loved  because  she'd  seen  his  strong  lean  hands  gripping  it. 

She  unrolled  it  and  pressed  it  against  her  face,  then  laid  it 
on  her  knee  and  smoothed  out  its  rumpled  folds  and  stroked  it. 

When  Dolly  came  in  a  half-hour  later,  or  so,  to  put  on  her 
other  suit  preparatory  to  the  matinee,  Rose  opened  up  the 
paper  and  pretended  to  read.  She  was  glad  of  the  protection 
of  it.  As  she  felt  just  now,  she  didn't  think  she  could  stand 
Dolly's  chatter  without  the  intervention  of  some  excuse  for 
monosyllabic  replies.  She  didn't  notice  that  Dolly  wasn't 
chattering.  Mechanically  she  read  the  head-lines :  Mortirnore 
Banks  Crash!  She  knew  who  Mortimore  was.  Once  a  power 
ful  boss,  now  a  discredited  politician.  He'd  owned  a  whole 
string  of  banks,  it  appeared — along  with  the  hitherto  un 
heard  of  Milligan — whose  solvency  seemed  to  have  evaporated 
along  with  the  decay  of  his  prestige. 

She  read  without  interest,  but  just  because  it  was  printed 
in  black-faced  type,  a  list  of  the  banks  in  Chicago  that  the 
examiner  had  closed.  But  presently  she  turned  back  with  a 
look  a  little  more  thoughtful,  and  read  it  again.  The  names 
of  banks  were  so  absurdly  alike  one  never  could  tell.  Pres 
ently  she  went  over  to  her  suit-case,  rummaged  in  it,  and  pro 
duced  a  little  bank-book.  Then  she  dropped  the  book  and  the 
newspaper  together  into  her  bag  and  shut  it. 

She  smiled  a  little  cynically.  Would  she  have  refused  Rod 
ney's  offer  of  help,  she  wondered,  if  she  had  known  an  hour 
ago,  that  the  two  hundred  dollars  she'd  relied  on  so  confidently 
to  pull  her  out  of  this  rut  and  give  her  a  fresh  start  whenever 
she  was  ready  to  attempt  it,  were  gone  into  the  pockets  of  that 
fat-faced  politician? 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE  END  OF  THE  TOUR 

FROM  Dubuque  the  company  made  a  circuit  northward 
into  Wisconsin  and  Minnesota,  swung  around  a  loop  and 
worked  their  way  south  again.  Disaster  stalked  behind  them 
all  the  way,  casting  its  lengthening  shadow  before  for  them 
to  walk  in.  On  the  very  first  salary  day  after  Eodney's  news 
paper  had  informed  Eose  of  her  true  financial  situation,  the 
manager  doled  out  a  little  money  on  account  to  the  more 
exigent  members  of  the  company,  and  remunerated  the  others 
with  thanks,  a  nervous  smile,  and  the  rock-ribbed  assurance 
that  they'd  get  it  all  next  week.  The  long  jump  they'd  just 
taken,  and  a  couple  of  bad  houses  (they  were  all  bad,  but  the 
two  he  spoke  of  couldn't  be  called  audiences  at  all,  except  by 
courtesy)  had  caused  a  temporary  stringency. 

Eose  saw  what  the  more  experienced  members  of  the  com 
pany  were  doing,  and  knew  that  she  ought  to  follow  their  ex 
ample;  keep  after  the  manager  for  her  money,  hound  him,  ap 
peal  to  him,  invent  fictitious  needs,  and  then  not  spend  a  cent 
except  what  was  absolutely  wrung  out  of  her  by  necessity,  so 
that  when  the  crash  came,  she  wouldn't  be  left  penniless.  But 
she  lacked  the  energy  to  do  it.  She  was  going  through  a  pass 
ing  phase  of  that  same  melancholy  acquiescence  in  the  decrees 
of  Fate,  which  had  been  Olga  Larson's  permanent  character 
istic  until  Eose's  own  fire  and  a  turn  in  the  tide  of  fortune 
had  roused  her. 

One  little  sequence  of  events  springing  directly  from  Eod 
ney's  visit  to  Dubuque,  contributed  largely  to  this  result.  The 
principal  actor  in  it  was  Dolly. 

Dolly's  manner  toward  her  had  altered  that  very  morning 
in  Dubuque,  though  Eose,  in  her  preoccupation,  didn't  mark 
the  change  for  a  day  or  two  afterward.  Then  she  saw  that  her 

430 


THE    END    OF   THE   TOUR  431 

frail  little  roommate  had  stopped  chattering;  that  she  no 
longer  made  nervous  little  excuses  for  leaving  her,  nor  in 
vented  transparent  little  fibs  to  account  for  absences.  She  be 
came,  in  her  absurdly  ineffectual  little  way,  surly*  and  defiant. 
She  took  to  going  about  openly  with  her  chorus-man,  sharing 
his  seat  with  him  on  the  train,  letting  him  carry  her  bag  for 
her  on  the  way  to  the  hotel;  and  her  manner  toward  Eose, 
when  any  of  these  manifestations  fell  beneath  her  eye,  was  one 
of  uneasy  challenge.  Let  Rose  just  try  to  remonstrate  with 
her  if  she  dared !  She  no  longer  came  back  to  the  hotel  with 
Rose  after  the  performances,  took  to  turning  up  at  their 
room  at  hours  that  grew  steadily  later  and  more  outrageous, 
and  while  at  first  she  stole  in  very  quietly,  undressed  in  the 
dark  and  tried  to  creep  into  bed  without  awakening  her,  she 
grew  rapidly  more  brazen  about  it;  turned  on  the  light  and 
undressed  before  the  mirror,  talked  elaborately  about  nothing 
and  laughed  her  high  nervous  little  laugh  without  occasion. 

It  was  not  a  lack  of  daring  that  kept  Rose  from  asking  the 
questions  that  were  so  patently  waiting  to  be  answered,  or 
from  making  the  remonstrances  that  Dolly's  behavior  so 
definitely  invited.  She  knew  she  ought  to  stir  herself  up  and 
do  something.  She  had  assumed,  she  knew,  a  measure  of 
moral  responsibility  for  the  fluffy  helpless  little  thing  she  had 
conquered  so  easily  at  first  and  taken  for  her  chum.  Of  course 
remonstrances,  moral  lectures,  scoldings,  wouldn't  accomplish 
anything.  What  the  situation  called  for  was  a  second  con 
quest;  a  reassertion  of  her  moral  dominance  over  the  girl. 
She  would  have  to  reconstruct  the  relation  which,  since  the 
first  week  of  their  tour,  she  had,  in  her  apathy,  allowed  to 
lapse.  But  that  apathy  had  become  too  strong  to  break.  She 
couldn't  rouse  herself  from  it.  And,  failing  that,  she  kept 
silent;  let  Dolly  go  her  ways. 

But  a  fortnight  after  Dubuque,  an  incident  occurred  that 
even  her  acquiescent  passivity  couldn't  ignore.  There  came 
a  fine  bright  afternoon  with  no  matinee  and  no  washing  or 
mending  that  needed  to  be  done,  when  she  suggested  to  Dolly 
that  they  go  out  for  a  good  walk.  Dolly  didn't  assent  to  the 
proposal,  though  the  suggestion  seemed  to  interest  her. 


THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"Where  is  there  to  walk  to  ?"  she  asked.  "These  towns  are 
all  alike." 

"I  don't  mean  just  a  stroll  around  the  town,"  Rose  said. 
"Look  here !  I'll  show  you."  She  pointed  from  the  window. 
"Across  that  bridge  (they  were  playing  one  of  the  Mississippi 
River  towns)  and  up  to  the  top  of  that  hill  on  the  other  side." 

"Gee !"  said  Dolly.    "That's  miles." 

"Do  you  good,"  said  Rose. 

"Are  you  going  there  anyway  ?"  asked  Dolly. 

Rose  nodded.  "You'd  better  come  along,"  she  said.  By 
turning  on  her  full  powers  of  persuasion,  she  might,  she  felt, 
have  pulled  Dolly  along  with  her;  swept  her  off  and  begun 
the  reconquest  she  knew  she  ought  to  make.  But  somehow  her 
will  failed  her.  Dolly  could  come  if  she  liked. 

Dolly  didn't  refuse  very  decisively,  but  she  watched  Rose's 
preparations  for  departure  without  making  any  of  her  own. 
It  wasn't  until  Rose,  at  the  door,  turned  back  to  renew  the 
invitation  for  the  last  time,  that  she  said  impatiently : 

"Oh,  go  along !    I'll  take  a  nap,  I  guess." 

So  Rose  set  out  by  herself. 

The  day  proved  colder  than  it  looked ;  a  fact  that  Rose  tried 
to  correct  by  walking  more  briskly.  But  when  she  got  out  on 
the  bridge  where  the  sharp  wind  got  a  full  sweep  at  her,  she 
saw  it  wasn't  going  to  do.  She'd  be  chilled  to  the  bones  long 
before  she  reached  that  hill  .and  it  would  be  colder  coming 
back.  She  must  go  back  for  her  ulster. 

Fifteen  minutes  later,  she  tried  the  door  of  her  room  and 
found  it  locked.  There  was  a  moment  of  dead  silence.  But 
the  realization  that  it  hadn't  been  quite  so  silent  the  mo 
ment  before,  caused  her  to  knock  again.  Then  she  heard  the 
creak  of  the  bed  and  the  thud  of  Dolly's  unshod  feet  on  the 
floor,  and  then  her  steps  coming  toward  the  door. 

"W — what — what  is  it?"  Rose  heard  her  ask. 

"Let  me  in,"  said  Rose.  "Sorry  I  disturbed  your  nap,  but 
I  had  to  come  back  for  my  ulster." 

Dolly  was  standing  just  at  the  other  side  of  the  door,  she 
knew,  but  there  was  no  sound  of  drawing  the  bolt.  Only 
a  long  silence  and  then  a  sob. 


THE    END    OF   THE    TOUE  433 

"What's  the  matter?"  Eose  demanded.    "Let  me  in." 

"You  can't  come  in!"  said  Dolly,  and  panic  couldn't  have 
spoken  plainer  than  in  her  voice.  "Oh,  go  away !  What  did 
you  come  back  for?  You  said  you  were  going  to  be  gone 
hours.  Go  away !" 

Out  of  a  frozen  throat  Eose  answered : 

"All  right.  I'll  go  away."  The  situation  was  too  miser 
ably  clear. 

She  went  down  to  the  lobby  and  a  sudden  giddiness  caused 
her  to  drop  down  into  the  first  chair  she  saw.  She  sat  there 
for  an  hour,  then  went  to  the  desk  and  told  the  clerk  she 
wanted  a  room  for  that  night  by  herself.  She'd  pay  the  extra 
price  of  it  now. 

The  clerk  took  the  money  and  selected  a  key  from  the  rack. 
The  look  he  saw  in  Eose's  face  silenced  any  comment,  jocular 
or  otherwise,  that  he  might  have  made. 

Bose  went  to  her  new  room,  took  off  her  hat  and  jacket, 
and  washed  her  face.  When  she  heard  the  supper  bell  ringing 
down-stairs,  she  went  back  to  her  old  room  and  knocked. 

"Come  in,"  said  Dolly,  and  Eose  entering,  found  her  stand 
ing  at  the  window  looking  out. 

She  had  tried,  while  she  sat  down  there  in  the  lobby,  and 
later  in  her  own  room,  to  think  out  what  she'd  say  to  Dolly 
when  they  next  met.  She  hadn't  been  able  to  think  of  any 
thing  to  say.  She  could  think  of  nothing  now.  So,  in  silence, 
she  began  putting  her  smaller  belongings  into  her  half  un 
packed  suit-case  and  laying  the  clothes  that  hung  in  the  closet 
across  a  chair. 

"So  you're  going  to  walk  out  on  me  are  you  ?"  said  Dolly. 
Eose  was  aware  that  she'd  been  watching  these  proceedings. 

"I'm  going  to  have  a  room  by  myself  for  to-night,"  said 
Eose. 

Dolly  amazed  her  by  flying  into  a  sudden  rage. 

"Oh,  you !"  she  said.  "You  make  me  sick.  You're  a  hypo 
crite,  that's  what  you  are.  Pretending  to  be  so  haughty  and 
innocent,  and  then  come  spying  back  here,  on  purpose,  and 
acting  so  shocked !  You  don't  think  I'm  fit  to  live  with,  do 
you.  Just  because  I've  got  a  friend.  You  thought  you  waa 


434'        THE  REAL  ADVENTURE 

fit  to  live  with  me,  all  right,  when  you  had  two  of  them  and 
wasn't  straight  with  either." 

Rose  straightened  up  and  looked  at  her.  "What  do  you 
mean?"  she  demanded. 

"That's  right,  go  on  with  the  bluff,"  said  Dolly  furiously. 
"But  you  can't  bluff  me.  Larson  put  me  wise  to  you  that  day 
in  Dubuque,  when  that  big  guy — 'Rodney' — came  up  to  see 
you.  He  was  one  of  them,  and  the  fellow  who  put  on  the 
show  in  Chicago — what's  his  name? — Galbraith,  was  the 
other.  You  tried  to  play  them  both  and  got  left." 

"That's  what  Olga  Larson  told  you?"  asked  Rose. 

"You  bet  it's  what  she  told  me,"  said  Dolly.  "It's  about 
half  what  she  told  me.  And  now  you  try  to  pull  your  high- 
and-mighty  airs  on  me,  just  because  Charlie  and  I  are  in  love 
and  ain't  married  yet.  We're  going  to  be.  We're  going  into 
vaudeville  as  soon  as  this  tour  ends.  He  says  the  managers 
don't  object  to  vaudeville  teams  being  married.  But  we've 
got  to  wait  till  then,  because  theatrical  managers  won't  have 
it.  And  yet  you're  walking  out  on  me  because  you're  too 
superior.  .  .  ." 

"I  don't  feel  superior,"  said  Rose.    "I'm  sorry,  that's  all." 

"Yes,  you  hypocrite!"  said  Dolly.  "Go  on  and  walk  out 
on  me.  I'm  glad  of  it." 

Rose  picked  up  her  suit-case  and  the  heap  of  clothes  and 
left  the  room  without  another  word. 

She  tried  to  be  more  astonished  and  indignant  over  Olga 
Larson's  part  in  this  affair  than  she  really  felt.  It  seemed 
so  horribly  cynical  not  to  be  surprised.  But  it  was  not 
cynicism;  just  an  unconscious  understanding  of  the  funda 
mental  processes  of  Olga's  mind. 

There  was  no  malice  in  the  story  she  had  told  Dolly,  just 
after  the  two  of  them,  looking  through  the  Moorish  archway 
in  the  hotel  there  in  Dubuque,  had  seen  Rose  and  Rodney 
deep  in  confidential  talk.  Olga  had  shown  surprise  and  then, 
elaborately,  tried  to  conceal  it.  She  knew  the  man,  all  right, 
but  hadn't  expected  him  to  follow  Dane  out  here.  Dolly  told 
her  about  the  note,  and  Olga's  jealousy,  which  had  been 
smoldering  ever  since  the  tour  began,  flared  up  again.  Even 


THE    END    OF   THE   TOUR  435 

in  the  days  of  their  closest  friendship — this  was  the  way  it 
looked  to  her  distorted  vision — Eose  had  never  been  frank 
with  her.  She  had  never  mentioned  a  man  named  Rodney, 
nor  even  shown  her  a  photograph.  The  only  person  Olga  had 
known  to  be  jealous  of,  was  Galbraith.  Her  unacknowledged 
reason  for  inventing  the  calumny  she  recited  so  glibly  for 
Dolly,  was  the  hope  that  Dolly  would  go  straight  to  Rose 
with  it. 

That  couldn't  fail,  she  thought,  to  break  down  Rose's 
attitude  of  icy  indifference  and  precipitate  a  quarrel;  and  a 
quarrel  was  what  she  wanted.  Because  quarrels  led  to  recon 
ciliations.  She  wanted  Rose  to  be  angry  with  her  and  then 
forgive  her,  although  the  latter  part  of  her  hope  was  quite 
unconscious. 

As  I  say,  Rose  understood.  She  didn't  work  the  thing  out 
in  detail;  didn't  want  to.  But  she  knew  that  if  she  sought 
Olga  out  and  demanded  an  explanation  of  the  detestable 
things  she'd  said  about  her,  the  scene  would  terminate  in  a 
torrent  of  self-reproach  from  Olga,  protestations  of  undying 
love,  fondlings  .  .  . 

So  Rose  shuddered  and  said  nothing.  The  only  thing  to 
do  about  the  whole  unspeakable  business  was,  as  far  as  possi 
ble,  to  disregard  it. 

It  wasn't  possible  to  disregard  it  utterly,  because  the  story 
was  evidently  spread.  She  became  conscious  of  a  touch  of 
contemptuous  hostility  on  the  part  of  everybody.  Not  on  ac 
count  of  her  moral  derelictions,  but  because  of  her  hypocrisy 
in  pretending  to  a  set  of  standards  of  breeding  and  behavior 
superior  to  those  held  by  the  rest  of  them. 

Altogether  it  made  complete  and  irresistible,  a  whole-souled 
loathing  of  the  life.  Her  attempt  to  find  a  way  to  a  career 
along  this  filthy  stage-door  alley  must  be  confessed  a  total 
failure.  She  could  never,  she  knew,  nerve  herself  to  look  for 
another  job  in  a  musical-comedy  chorus. 

At  the  next  overnight  stop  they  made,  Dolly  went  in  to 
room  with  the  duchess,  and  the  duchess*  former  roommate, 
a.  fattish  blonde  girl  with  a  permanent  cold  in  the  head,  came 
in  with  her. 


436  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

Somehow  the  days  dragged  along  until  the  pursuing  and 
long  visible  disaster  finally  overtook  the  company  in  Cen- 
tropolis,  Illinois  (this  is  not  the  real  name  of  the  city,  but  it 
is  no  more  flagrant  a  misnomer  than  the  one  it  boasts).  They 
played  a  matinee  here  and  an  evening  performance,  to  two 
almost  empty  houses;  that  gave  them  the  coup  de  grace. 

There  was  no  call  posted  on  the  bulletin  board  that  night, 
and  the  next  day,  after  a  brisk  exchange  of  telegrams  with 
Chicago,  the  manager  called  the  company  together  in  one 
of  the  sample-rooms  of  the  hotel  and  announced  that  the  tour 
was  off.  He  also  announced,  with  a  magnanimity  that  put 
far  into  the  background  the  fact  that  he  owed  them  all  at 
least  two  weeks'  salary,  that  everybody  in  the  company  would 
be  provided  with  a  first-class  ticket  for  Chicago.  There  was 
nothing,  except  his  scrupulous  sense  of  honor,  he  managed  to 
imply  without  saying  it  in  so  many  words,  to  prevent  his 
going  off  to  Chicago  all  by  himself  and  leaving  them  stranded 
here.  But,  though  this  might  be  good  business,  he  was  in 
capable  of  it.  If  they  would  all  come  down  to  the  station  at 
eleven  o'clock,  and  sign  a  receipt  discharging  him  from  fur 
ther  obligations,  he  would  see  that  their  transportation  was 
arranged  for. 

It  was  just  after  this  that  Rose  caught  a  glimpse  of  Dolly 
shivering  in  a  corner,  weeping  into  a  soiled  pocket-handker 
chief.  The  fat  girl  with  a  cold  supplied  her  with  the  ex 
planation. 

Dolly's  chorus-man,  it  seemed,  had  already  departed  on 
an  earlier  train  to  St.  Louis,  where  he  lived,  without  taking 
any  leave  of  her  at  all. 

Rose  wanted  to  go  over  and  try  to  comfort  the  child,  but 
somehow  she  couldn't  manage  to.  Sentimentalizing  over  her 
grief  and  disillusionment  wouldn't  do  any  good.  The  grief 
probably  wasn't  more  than  an  inch  deep  anyway,  and  the 
illusions  had  been  too  tawdry  to  regret.  As  for  doing  any 
thing,  what  was  there  one  could  do? 

There  wasn't  much  that  Rose  could  do  at  any  rate.  Because 
after  weeks  of  drifting,  she'd  come  to  a  resolution. 

She  didn't  go  to  the  railway  station  to  sign  her  receipt  and 


THE    END    OP   THE    TOUR  437 

get  her  ticket  to  Chicago.  What  was  there  in  Chicago  for 
her?  She  meant  to  stay,  for  the  present,  at  any  rate,  in 
Centropolis.  She  checked  her  suit-case  in  the  coat-room  and, 
with  a  sensation  of  relief,  watched  the  mournful  company  file 
away. 

She  had  three  dollars  and  some  small  change,  and  the  day 
before  her. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  CONQUEST   OF   CENTEOPOLIS 

CENTROPOLIS  wasn't  a  very  big  town,  but  it  had  a  wide,  well 
paved  street  lined  with  stores,  and  a  pleasant  variety  of  gravel 
roads  winding  round  hills  that  had  neat  and  fairly  prosperous- 
looking  houses  scattered  over  them.  A  rather  dignified  old 
court-house  among  the  big  trees  of  the  Square  proclaimed  the 
place  a  county  seat.  It  was  a  warm  April  day ;  the  grass  was 
green  and  the  little  leaves  already  were  bursting  out  on  the 
shrubbery. 

Eose's  idea  was  to  stroll  about  a  little  and  get  her  bear 
ings  first,  and  then  go  into  one  store  after  another  on  Main 
Street  until  she  should  find  a  job.  She  had  no  serious  mis 
giving  that  she  wouldn't  get  one  eventually;  before  night, 
•  this  was  to  say. 

Her  confidence  sprang  from  two  sources :  one,  that  though 
inexperienced  she  knew  she  was  intelligent,  willing  and  at 
tractive.  People,  she  found,  were  apt  to  be  disposed  in  her 
favor.  The  other  source  of  her  confidence  was  that  she 
wasn't  looking  for  much.  She  would  take,  for  the  present, 
anything  that  offered.  Because  any  sort  of  work,  even  menial 
work,  would  be  a  relief  after  that  nightmare  tour.  The  weeks 
since  she  had  left  Chicago,  especially  the  last  two  or  three 
of  them,  seemed  unreal,  and  the  incidents  of  them  as  if  they 
couldn't  have  happened.  Anything  that  didn't  involve  asso 
ciations  with  that  detestable  company,  and  the  unspeakable 
piece  they  had  played,  would  seem — well,  almost  heavenly. 
If  she  couldn't  get  a  job  in  a  store,  she'd  go  and  be  a  waitress 
at  the  hotel.  She  could  make  a  pretty  good  waitress,  she 
thought. 

But  her  confidence  was  short-lived.  She  cut  short  her  ram 
ble  about  the  streets  because  of  the  stares  she  attracted,  and 

438 


THE  CONQUEST  OF  CENTEOPOLIS    439 

the  remarks  about  herself  that  she  couldn't  ignore.  Young 
men  shouted  at  each  other  directing  attention  to  her  with  a 
brutality  of  epithet  that  brought  the  blood  to  her  cheeks.  Dur 
ing  all  the  time  she  had  had  that  room  on  Clark  Street  in 
Chicago,  through  their  rehearsals  and  that  month  of  perform 
ances,  she'd  gone  alone  about  the  streets  at  all  sort  of  hours, 
both  in  the  theatrical  part  of  the  loop  and  in  the  district  where 
she  lived,  without  any  molestation  whatever.  The  small  towns 
that  she  had  visited  with  the  company  had  been  different  of 
course.  She'd  been  stared  at  in  the  streets  and  not  infre 
quently  addressed.  She'd  forgiven  that  because  she  was  a 
member  of  the  company.  It  was  natural  enough  for  people 
to  stare  at  a  girl  they'd  paid  to  see  on  the  stage  the  night  be 
fore,  or  were  going  to  see  to-night. 

Now  she  discovered  that  the  company  had  been  an  im 
mense  protection  to  her;  had  accounted  for  her,  caused  her  to 
be  taken,  to  a  certain  extent,  for  granted.  The  wild  beast  that 
comes  to  town  with  the  circus,  though  an  object  of  legitimate 
curiosity,  does  not  excite  the  hostile  and  fearful  speculation 
that  he  would  if  he  were  left  behind  after  the  circus  had  gone. 

People  got  together  in  groups  and  nodded  at  her,  pointed 
at  her.  A  few  of  them  leered,  but  more  of  them  scowled. 
There  seemed  to  be  a  sense  of  outrage  that  she  hadn't  left  the 
town  when  the  rest  did. 

There  was  a  dry-goods  store  on  the  principal  corner  of  the 
street,  which  she'd  selected  as  she  walked  along  as  the  place 
to  begin  her  quest.  She  made  a  detour  around  two  or  three 
blocks  in  order  to  avoid  retracing  her  steps  down  Main  Street 
and  slipped  into  the  door  of  this  establishment  as  unostenta 
tiously  as  she  could. 

She  was  saved  inquiring  for  the  proprietor  by  the  convic 
tion  that  the  rather  dapper-looking  gray-haired  man  who  came 
blinking  toward  her  in  a  near-sighted  way  as  she  paused  in 
the  main  aisle,  was  he.  He  had  a  good  deal  of  manner  and 
was  evidently  proud  of  it.  But  he  looked  neither  weak  nor 
foolish. 

'vMy  name's  Rose  Stanton,"  she  said  as  he  came  up.  "I've 
come  to  see  if  I  can  get  employment  in  your  store." 


440  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

His  manner  changed  instantly.  He  came  a  step  closer  and 
stared  at  her  with  a  surprise  he  didn't  try  to  conceal. 

"I  haven't  had  any  experience  as  a  saleswoman,"  she  went 
on,  "and  I  know  there's  a  lot  to  learn.  But  I'd  work  hard 
and  learn  as  fast  as  ..." 

"Excuse  me,"  he  said,  "but  aren't  you  a  member  of  that 
theatrical  company  that  was  here  last  night  ?" 

The  intensity  with  which  he  was  staring  at  her  made  her 
look  away  and  her  eyes  rested  on  a  young  man  whose  strong 
family  likeness  to  the  proprietor  identified  him  for  her  as  his 
son;  he  had  come  up  and  was  waiting  for  a  word  with  his 
father.  At  this  question  he  stared  at  her  too. 

The  older  man  whipped  around  on  his  son.  "Clear  out, 
Jim,"  he  said  sharply.  And  then  to  Eose :  "You  haven't 
answered  my  question." 

"I  was  a  member  of  that  company,"  she  said.    "But    ..." 

"We  have  no  vacancy  at  present,"  he  said  sharply.  "Good 
day." 

She  flinched  a  little  but  stood  her  ground.  "I  said  I  wasn't 
experienced  as  a  saleswoman,"  she  said,  "but  there  are  some 
things  I  know  a  good  deal  about — clothes  and  hats.  .  .  ." 

He  hadn't  stayed  to  listen ;  had  walked  straight  to  the  door 
and  opened  it.  Reluctantly  she  followed  him. 

"There's  no  place,"  he  said,  "in  this  store,  or  I  trust  in  the 
town  either,  for  young  women  of  your  sort.  Good  day !" 

Eose  made  five  more  applications  for  work  on  Main  Street, 
all  with  the  same  result.  Some  of  those  who  refused  her  were 
panicky  about  it;  one  threatened  to  have  her  put  in  jail.  One 
looked  knowing  and  after  he  had  expressed  in  jocular  though 
emphatic  terms,  his  sense  of  her  impossibility  as  a  publicly 
acknowledged  employee,  intimated  a  desire  to  prosecute  a 
personal  acquaintance  with  her  further. 

She  had  left  the  first  store  incredulous  rather  than  angry, 
under  the  impression  that  she  had  encountered  a  chance 
fanatic.  It  seemed  impossible  that  anybody  with  a  well-bal 
anced  mind,  could  treat  her  as  if  she  carried  contamination, 
merely  because  she  had  earned  a  living  for  a  while  in  the 
chorus  of  a  musical  comedy.  It  was  fortunate  for  her  that 


THE    CONQUEST    OF    CENTEOPOLIS         441 

her  first  applications  were  met  by  anger,  rude  discourtesy, 
and  openly  avowed  suspicion,  because  this  treatment  roused 
in  her,  for  the  first  time  in  months,  a  strong  surge  of  indigna 
tion.  Her  blood  came  up  after  these  encounters,  nearer  and 
nearer  the  boiling  point.  The  man  who  smiled  at  her  like  a 
satyr,  was  shriveled  by  the  blaze  of  her  blue  eyes,  and  was 
left,  red-faced,  blustering  weakly  after  her. 

When  she  walked  back  to  the  hotel  along  Main  Street  the 
lassitude  that  had  so  long  held  her  half-paralyzed  was  gone. 
She  was  the  old  Eose  again;  the  Eose  whom  Galbraith  would 
have  recognized. 

She  didn't  know  it.  She  was  conscious  of  nothing  but  a 
hot  determination  that  had  not,  as  yet,  even  expressed  itself 
in  terms.  It  was  just  a  newly  kindled  fire  that  warmed  her 
shivering  spirit ;  that  made  her  fearless ;  in  a  quite  unreason 
ing  way,  confident. 

The  only  touch  of  self-conscious  thought  about  her  was  a 
vague  wonder  at  her  long  submission.  What  had  she  been 
doing  all  that  while,  drifting  like  that,  letting  herself  be 
beaten  like  that,  consenting  to  live  amid  the  shabby  degrada 
tions  of  the  life  that  had  surrounded  her  ever  since  the  com 
pany  had  gone  on  the  road?  The  sense  of  the  unreality  of 
those  past  weeks  grew  stronger.  She  felt  like  a  person  just 
waking  out  of  a  long  troubled  dream. 

She  made  her  way  among  the  loungers  in  the  lobby  of  the 
hotel,  not  unmindful  of  their  stares,  but  magnificently  im 
pervious  to  them ;  came  up  to  the  desk  and  told  the  clerk  she 
wanted  to  see  the  proprietor. 

"Nothing  doing,"  said  the  clerk. 

Then  as  he  got  the  straight  look  of  her  eyes,  he  amended  his 
speech  a  little. 

"It  won't  do  you  any  good  to  see  him,"  he  said  sulkily. 

"I'll  see  him,  if  you  please,"  said  Eose.  "Will  you  have 
him  called?" 

The  clerk  hesitated.  Stranded  "actresses"  weren't  in  the 
habit  of  talking  like  that.  They  always  wanted  to  see  the 
proprietor,  they  were  always  on  the  point  of  receiving  an 
ample  remittance  from  some  generally  distant  place.  They 


442  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

were  often  very  queenly,  incredibly  outraged  that  their  sol 
vency  should  be  questioned.  But  their  voices  never  had  the 
cool  confident  ring  that  this  girl's  voice  had,  nor  the  look  in 
their  eyes,  the  purposeful  thrust. 

He  hesitated  uncomfortably.  Then  his  difficulty  was  solved 
for  him. 

"There  he  goes  now,"  he  said.  "You  can  talk  to  him  if 
you  like." 

The  proprietor  was  sixty  years  old,  perhaps;  gray,  stooped, 
stringy  of  neck.  He  had  a  short-cropped  mustache,  one  corner 
of  which  he  was  always  caressing  with  a  protruding  under- 
lip.  He  had  a  good  shrewd  pair  of  eyes,  not  altogether  un 
kindly.  Rose  had  seen  him  before,  but  hadn't  known  who  he 
was. 

He  was  making,  just  now,  for  a  little  office  he  had,  that 
opened  into  the  railed-off  space  behind  the  desk,  and,  by  an 
other  door,  into  the  corridor.  He  had  another  man  with  him, 
but  it  was  evident  that  their  business  wasn't  going  to  take 
long.  The  door  into  the  corridor  was  left  open  behind  them, 
and  there  Rose  waited.  When  the  other  man  came  out,  she 
stepped  inside. 

There  was  nothing  kindly  about  the  look  the  proprietor's 
eyes  directed  at  her  when  he  saw  who  she  was.  He  looked  up 
at  her  with  a  frown  of  resignation. 

"So  you  didn't  go  to  Chicago  with  the  rest  of  the  troupe  ?" 
he  said.  "That's  where  you  made  a  mistake,  I  guess." 

"I  didn't  want  to  go  to  Chicago,"  she  said. 

"I  suppose,"  he  drawled  ironically,  "you've  written  or  tele 
graphed  to  some  friends  for  money,  and  that  it's  surely  com 
ing,  and  that  you  want  to  stay  here  in  my  hotel  on  credit  till 
it  does.  Well,  there's  not  a  chance  in  the  world.  The  clerk 
could  have  told  you  that.  I  suppose  he  did." 

"I  haven't  sent  for  money,"  said  Rose.  "There's  no  one  I 
could  send  to.  I've  got  to  earn  it  for  myself  and  I  thought 
there  was  as  good  a  chance  to  earn  it  here  as  in  Chicago." 

"Well,  by  God!"  said  the  proprietor.  "You've  got  your 
nerve  with  you  at  any  rate.  But  I'll  tell  you,  young  woman, 
the  town  of  Centropolis  don't  take  kindly  to  the  efforts  of 


THE    CONQUEST    OF    CENTROPOLIS         443 

young  women  of  your  sort  to  make  a  living  nor  to  the  way 
they  make  it." 

"You're  wrong,"  said  Rose,  dangerously  quiet,  "if  you  think 
I  mean  to  make  a  living  in  any  other  than  a  decent  honest 
way.  I  have  already  asked  for  work  in  five  places  on  Main 
Street  and  I  have  been  refused  as  if  I  were  the — sort  of  per 
son  you've  just  called  me.  I'm  going  to  keep  on  until  I  find 
somebody  in  this  town  who's  clean  enough  minded  to  recog 
nize  decency  when  he  sees  it.  There  are  people  like  that,  of 
course,  even  in  Centropolis.  I  didn't  come  in  here  to  borrow 
money  of  you,  nor  to  ask  for  credit.  I  came  to  ask  for  a  job 
as  a  waitress." 

The  proprietor  stared  at  her.  "Well,"  he  said,  "you  are  a 
new  one  on  John  Culver.  I  never  got  up  against  your  game 
before." 

"I  haven't  any  game,"  said  Rose.  "I've  told  you  the  exact 
truth." 

Culver  twisted  around  uneasily  in  his  chair  and  began  bit 
ing  thoughtfully  on  the  end  of  a  lead-pencil. 

"Well,"  he  said  at  last,  "I'll  take  a  chance.  I'll  tell  you 
about  a  job  I  think  you  can  get.  Only  it  won't  do  you  any 
good  to  use  my  name.  If  the  man  you  go  to  comes  to  me,  I 
can't  tell  him  anything  about  you  but  what  I  know.  His 
name's  Albert  Zeider  and  he's  got  a  picture  house  three  doors 
down  the  street.  He's  just  put  in  a  glass  cage  out  in  front, 
and  he  wants  a  pretty  girl  to  sit  in  it  and  sell  tickets.  He 
hasn't  been  able  to  get  anybody  yet  that  filled  the  bill.  So 
maybe  he'd  take  a  chance  on  you.  Only,  mind,  don't  tell  him 
I  recommended  you." 

"I  won't,"  said  Rose.  "I  won't  go  to  him  at  all.  I've  walked 
the  length  of  Main  Street  and  back  this  morning,  and  I  won't 
sit  in  Mr.  Zeider's  glass  cage.  I'll  wash  dishes  or  scrub  floors, 
but  I  won't  do  that." 

The  proprietor  flung  out  his  hands  with  the  air  of  a  man 
of  whom  nothing  more  could  be  expected. 

"Well,  then,"  he  said,  "if  you  won't  take  a  decent  job  that's 
offered  to  you.  .  .  ." 

"It's  not  a  decent  job,"  said  Rose.   "Not  for  me;  not  for  a 


444  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

girl  who's  looked  on  in  this  town  as  I  am.  I  want  work! 
Don't  you  understand?"  Then,  after  a  pause,  "Won't  you 
give  it  to  me  ?" 

"Well,  I  should  say  not/'  said  John  Culver.  "Look  here ! 
What's  the  use  ?  Suppose  you  are  what  you  say  .  .  ." 

"You  know  I  am,"  interrupted  Eose. 

"Well,  I  say,  suppose  it's  true.  What's  the  use?  Do  you 
think  any  decent  store-keeper  on  Main  Street  would  risk  his 
reputation  by  giving  a  job  to  a  stranded  actress  that  had 
come  here  with  a  rotten  show  like  the  one  you  was  with;  or 
that  I  could  have  you  in  my  dining-room?  This  is  a  respect 
able  hotel,  I  tell  you." 

He  broke  off  to  wave  his  hand  genially  to  a  man  who  was 
walking  slowly  by  the  door  on  his  way  down  to  the  dining- 
room. 

"There !"  he  went  on  to  Eose.  "That's  what  I  mean !  That's 
Judge  Granger  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  this  state.  He's  come 
here  regularly  for  meals,  when  he  ain't  in  Springfield,  for  the 
last  fifteen  years.  He's  the  biggest  man  in  this  county.  Do 
you  suppose  he'd  stand  for  it,  if  I  asked  him  to  give  his  order 
to  a  busted  actress  ?" 

"Would  you  stand  for  it  if  he  did?"  demanded  Eose.  "If 
he  told  you  that  I  was  all  right  and  asked  you  to  give  me  a 
job,  would  you  do  it  ?" 

The  proprietor  laughed  impatiently.  "What's  the  good  of 
talking  nonsense?"  he  demanded.  "Yes,  I  would,  if  that'll 
satisfy  you.  But  you'd  better  take  the  next  train  for  Chicago. 
And  if  .  .  . "  He  hesitated,  stroked  his  mustache  again 
with  his  under-lip,  and  went  on, — "Oh,  I  suppose  I'm  a 
damned  fool,  but  if  a  couple  of  dollars  will  help  you 
out  .  .  ." 

"No,  thank  you,"  said  Eose.  "I'm  going  to  see  the  judge." 
And  she  cut  off  John  Culver's  exclamation  of  protest  by  walk 
ing  out  of  the  office. 

Eose  went  back  to  the  desk,  told  the  clerk  she  wanted 
dinner,  and  forestalled  the  objection  she  saw  him  preparing 
to  make,  by  laying  a  dollar  bill  on  the  counter.  He  even 


THE   CONQUEST    OF    CENTEOPOLIS        445 

hesitated  a  little  over  that,  but  he  took  it  and  gave  her  a  quar 
ter  in  change. 

"That'll  be  all  right/'  he  said,  and  she  went  the  way  the 
judge  had  gone,  down  the  corridor  to  the  dining-room.  A 
glance  showed  her  where  he  sat,  and  without  waiting  for  the 
assistance  of  the  head  waitress,  she  chose  a  chair  near  the  door, 
facing  it,  and  with  her  back  to  the  judge. 

Those  were  rather  audacious  tactics.  Seventy-five  cents,  in 
the  present  state  of  her  finances,  was  a  good  deal  to  squander 
on  a  meal.  And  the  fact  that  she  was  openly  stalking  the 
judge  might  lead  John  Culver  to  give  his  honored  patron  a 
word  of  warning.  But  Rose  didn't  care.  No  tactics  but  the 
simplest  and  most  direct  appealed  to  her.  When  the  judge 
finished  his  dinner,  she  would  follow  him  to  his  office,  wher 
ever  it  might  be,  walk  in  with  him,  and  demand  a  hearing. 
If  he  were  forewarned,  she  would  find  some  other  way  of  get 
ting  access  to  him. 

But,  whether  the  proprietor  was  really  ignorant  of  her  plan, 
or  whether  the  little  scene  with  her  in  his  office  had  shaken 
him  so  that  he  didn't  care  to  try  conclusions  with  her  again, 
the  judge  was  left  to  his  fate.  Eose  followed  him,  unmolested, 
down  the  corridor  and  out  into  the  street,  across  the  road 
and  up  a  flight  of  outside  steps,  to  the  second  story  of  a  brick 
building  opposite. 

He  was  fitting  his  key  into  the  lock  when  she  came  up.  And 
though  he  drew  his  eyebrows  down  into  a  frown  as  he  looked 
at  her,  it  seemed  to  be  rather  in  the  effort  to  make  out  who 
she  was,  than  from  any  feeling  of  hostility.  He  asked  her  with 
a  dry  and  rather  affected  judicial  courtesy,  what  he  could  do 
for  her. 

"You  can  do  me  a  service,"  said  Eose,  "that  I  don't  think 
you  will  mind.  Will  you  let  me  come  in  for  about  a  minute 
and  tell  you  what  it  is  ?" 

His  manner  chilled  a  little,  but  his  curt  nod  gave  her  per 
mission  to  precede  him  into  his  office. 

The  outer  room  was  bleak  enough,  furnished  with  three 
or  four  hard  chairs,  a  table  and  an  old  black  walnut  desk  with 


446  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

a  typewriter  on  it.  His  secretary  or  stenographer  was  evi 
dently  still  at  dinner,  because  the  room  was  empty. 

The  judge  walked  straight  into  an  inner  room  and  Rose 
followed  him. 

It  was  a  big,  rather  fine-looking  room,  or  so  it  looked  to 
Rose  after  the  places  she  had  been  seeing  lately;  evidently, 
from  a  beam  across  the  middle  of  the  ceiling,  cut  out  of  two. 
There  was  a  fireplace  with  a  fire  in  it,  a  big  oak  table  and  a 
number  of  easy  chairs.  There  were  two  or  three  good  rugs  on 
the  floor,  and  the  walls  were  completely  lined  with  books ;  the 
familiar  buckram  and  leather-bound,  red-labeled  law-books 
that  gave  her  memory  a  pang. 

In  these  surroundings,  the  judge  took  on  an  added  impres- 
siveness,  and  he  was  not  an  unimpressive-looking  man.  He 
was  not  large.  Nose,  mouth  and  chin  were  small  and  rather 
fine,  and  he  had  the  shape  of  head  that  is  described  as  a  schol 
ar's.  One  might  not  have  remarked  it  in  the  hotel  dining- 
room,  but  in  these  surroundings,  he  looked  altogether  a  judge. 

But  the  effect  of  this  on  Rose  was  only  to  heighten  her  con 
fidence.  She  hadn't  used  the  dinner  hour  to  think  out  what 
she'd  say  to  him.  She'd  been  thinking  of  Rodney  again.  Some 
how,  just  the  rebirth  of  a  sense  of  power  in  her,  had  brought 
the  image  of  him  back.  She  was  throbbing  with  that  sense 
now,  and  her  thoughts  of  Rodney  had  given  her  an  exhilarat 
ing  idea.  This  man  that  she  was  about  to  confront  was  one 
whom  Rodney  had  often  confronted.  It  was  before  this  man, 
on  the  bench  of  the  Supreme  Court,  up  at  Springfield,  that 
Rodney  had  made  uncounted  arguments.  She  would  try  to 
do  as  well  as  he  did. 

The  judge  was  staring  at  her  in  growing  perplexity.  "Who 
in  the  world  could  she  be.  What  did  she  want?  His  very 
greatness  in  this  little  town  made  him  accessible.  It  was  so 
unthinkable  a  thing  that  any  one  should  intrude  upon  his  time 
frivolously.  But  this  girl!  She  didn't  belong  in  the  town. 
Hadn't  he  seen  her  about  the  hotel  yesterday,  with  that  shabby 
theatrical  troupe? 

"You  will  please  be  brief/3  he  said.   "My  time  is  limited." 

"I'll  be  as  brief  as  I  can,"  said  Rose. 


THE  CONQUEST  OF  OBNTBOPOUS    447 

He  sat  down  in  his  desk  chair,  but  she  did  not  avail  herself 
of  the  permission  his  half-hearted  nod  toward  another  chair 
accorded  her;  remained  standing  across  the  table  from  him. 

"I  came  to  Centropolis  day  before  yesterday,"  said  Eose, 
"with  a  theatrical  company  that  failed.  They  went  away  this 
morning  unpaid,  with  nothing  but  tickets  to  Chicago.  I  de 
cided  to  stay  here  and  try  to  get  work.  I  applied  for  it  at  five 
places  on  Main  Street  this  morning,  and  then  went  to  Mr. 
Culver  at  the  hotel.  I  asked  him  for  a  position  as  a  waitress." 

Already  the  judge  was  tapping  his  pencil. 

"This  doesn't  concern  me  in  the  least,"  he  said.  "I  have  no 
possible  employment  for  you.  I  can  do  nothing  for  you.  Good 
day!" 

"Employment  isn't  what  I  want  from  you,"  said  Eose.  "I'll 
come  to  what  I  do  want  in  a  minute." 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  the  judge  hadn't  been  caught  up  with 
a  round  turn  like  that  in  years.  He  stared  at  her  now  in  per 
fectly  blank  amazement. 

"Mr.  Culver,"  she  went  on,  "told  me  why  I  hadn't  been  suc 
cessful.  He  accused  me  of  being  the  sort  of  person  no  decent 
employer  would  give  work  to,  of  being  a  person  of  bad  char 
acter.  I  convinced  him,  I  think,  that  I  was  not.  Then  he 
said  that  even  though  I  were  a  perfectly  honest,  decent  woman, 
he  wouldn't  dare  put  me  in  his  dining-room.  He  cited  you  as 
the  reason." 

At  that  the  judge  suddenly  went  purple. 

"Me !"  he  shouted. 

The  tension  of  Eose's  body  relaxed  a  little.  A  smile  flick 
ered  just  instantaneously  over  her  mouth. 

"He  used  you  as  an  example,"  she  explained.  "He  said  that 
you  were  the  most  important  person  in  the  county ;  that  your 
opinion  counted  for  the  most.  He  said  that  you  were  a  regular 
patron  of  his  hotel,  and  that  you'd  object  seriously  to  giving 
your  order,  as  he  said,  to  a  ^busted  actress.' ': 

"That's  perfectly  unwarranted,"  fumed  the  judge.  "Culver 
had  no  right  to  use  my  name  like  that.  It's  outrageous !" 

"I  hoped  you'd  feel  that  way,"  said  Eose. 

The  judge  pounded  on  the  desk.   "That's  not  what  I  mean. 


448  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUBE 

He  had  no  right  to  drag  me  into  it  at  all;  into  a  miserable 
business  like  that." 

"It  is  a  miserable  business,"  Rose  assented.  "It's  a  thor 
oughly  contemptible  business.  But  Mr.  Culver  didn't  drag 
you  into  it  deliberately.  You  were  passing  the  door  as  we 
stood  talking,  and  he  used  you  for  an  illustration.  But  after 
ward  he  said  that  if  you  told  him  it  was  all  right  to  give  me 
a  job,  he  would  do  it.  That's  what  I  have  come  up  to  ask 
you  to  do." 

"That,"  said  the  judge,  setting  his  teeth  and  breathing 
hard,  "is  the  most  monstrous  piece  of  impudence  I  have  ever 
heard  of.  On  his  part  as  well  as  yours.  What  have  I  to  do 
with  John  Culver's  waitresses?" 

He  wasn't  expecting  an  answer  to  this  question,  but  Eose 
had  one  ready  for  him. 

"You've  given  him  the  idea,  without  meaning  to  most  likely, 
that  you  wouldn't  tolerate  a  girl  among  them  who'd  been 
earning  her  living  on  the  stage.  If  that's  just  a  stupid  mis 
take  of  his,  I'm  asking  you  to  tell  him  so." 

"Well,  I  won't,"  said  the  judge.  "The  thing's  preposterous. 
You're  asking  me  for  what  amounts  to  a  guarantee.  In  the 
first  place,  I  don't  know  that  you're  not — after  all — what  you 
say  you  convinced  Culver  that  you  were  not." 

"I  think  you  do,"  said  Eose  thoughtfully,  with  a  steady 
look  he  angrily  turned  away  from.  "I  think  you  know,  with 
out  any  reason  at  all,  just  from  your  instinct  and  your  ex 
perience  in  judging  people.  And  if  you  don't  know  it  that 
way,  I  think  you  can  prove  it  to  }rourself  by  common  sense.  Do 
you  think  it  likely  that  if  a  girl  of  my — appearance  and— 
manners,  had  a  mind  to  practise  the — profession  you've  talked 
about,  she  would  be  here  in  Centropolis,  fighting  desperately 
like  this,  going  through  humiliations  like  this,  for  a  chance  to 
be  a  waitress  in  Mr.  Culver's  dining-room?" 

She  stopped  there  and  took  a  good  deep  breath  and  waited. 
There  was  a  solid  minute  of  silence.  The  judge  got  up  out  of 
his  chair  and  began  pacing  the  room  with  short  impatient 
steps.  He  stopped  with  a  jerk  two  or  three  times,  as  if  he  were 


THE  CONQUEST  OF  CENTROPOLIS    449 

about  to  demolish  her  with  speech,  but  always  gave  up  the  at 
tempt  before  a  word  was  spoken. 

"Oh,  I  admit  it's  a  hard  case,"  he  said  at  last.  "You've  ap 
parently  been  a  victim  of  circumstance.  The  people  down  in 
this  part  of  the  country  are  perhaps  narrow.  In  the  main  it's 
a  good  sort  of  narrowness.  It's  better  than  the  broadness  of 
your  cities.  But  in  an  isolated  case  it  may  work  an  injustice." 
Then  he  wheeled  on  her.  "But  7  can't  do  anything  for  you. 
Can't  you  see  that  I  can't  do  anything  for  you?" 

"I  don't  see,"  said  Rose,  "why  you  can't  do  what  I  ask." 

"Have  it  known,"  shouted  the  judge,  "in  this  town  and  all 
over  the  county,  and  all  over  the  Supreme  Court  district,  as 
it  would  be  in  another  week,  that  I  had  gone  to  John  Culver 
and  got  a  job  in  his  hotel — the  hotel  where  I  go  myself,  three 
times  a  day — for  a  girl  who  got  left  behind  by  a  stranded 
comic-opera  company?  Now  can't  you  see?  I'm  coming  up 
for  re-election  in  two  years." 

Rose  drew  in  a  long  sigh  and  for  a  moment  drooped  a  little. 

"Yes,  I  see,"  she  said  with  a  rueful  little  smile.  They  were 
afraid  of  him,  and  he  was  afraid  of  them. 

"I'm  sorry  about  it,"  said  the  judge.  "If  there's  anything 
else  I  can  do  .  .  ."  He  put  his  hand  tentatively  in  his 
pocket. 

"No,"  Rose  said,  "that  isn't  what  I  want.  Mr.  Culver  of 
fered  me  two  dollars  to  go  away.  I  suppose  you  might  offer 
me  ten.  But  I'm  not  going.  There  is  somebody  in  this  town 
who  isn't  afraid  of  anybody,  if  I  can  only  find  out  who  that 
somebody  is." 

For  a  moment  the  judge  looked  annoyed;  tried  to  collect 
his  scattered  dignity.  But  presently  a  twinkle  lighted  up  in 
his  eye.  Then  he  smiled.  "You  might  try  Miss  Gibbons,"  he 
said. 

"Who  is  she?"  Rose  asked. 

By  now  the  judge  was  smiling  broadly.  Apparently  there 
was  something  exquisitely  humorous  in  the  notion  of  an  en 
counter  between  Rose  and  this  lady  he'd  mentioned. 

"She's  lived,"  he  said,  "and  practised  gossip  and  millinery, 


450  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

for  the  last  thirty  years,  up  over  the  drug-store  on  the  next 
corner.  It's  quite  true  that  there's  nobody  in  this  tier  of  coun 
ties  that  she's  afraid  of.  But  I  don't  recommend  her  seriously. 
You  will  get  small  comfort  out  of  her." 

"All  right,"  said  Rose,  "we'll  see." 

She  walked  straight  from  the  judge's  office  to  the  stairs 
beside  the  drug-store  on  the  next  corner,  which  led  up  to  Miss 
Gibbons'  atelier.  She  walked  fast,  conserving  as  a  precious 
thing  that  might  ebb  away  from  her,  the  warm  feeling  of  in 
dignant  contempt  her  talk  with  the  judge  had  inspired  her 
with.  He  was  the  biggest  man  in  this  part  of  the  state,  was 
he !  Why,  he  was  a  hollow  man !  A  fabric  of  lath  and  plaster 
with  no  structural  pillars  inside !  Well,  if  the  rest  of  the  town 
was  afraid  of  him,  she  certainly  wasn't  afraid  of  the  rest  of 
the  town. 

She  hadn't  any  thought  of  conciliating  Miss  Gibbons,  of 
asking  Miss  Gibbons  to  give  her  a  chance.  She  was  going  to 
give  Miss  Gibbons  a  chance  to  prove  whether  she  was  lath  and 
plaster  like  the  judge,  or  a  real  person  with  something  besides 
her  fagade  to  hold  her  up. 

So  it  wasn't  at  all  in  the  manner  of  a  disheartened  applicant 
for  work  that  she  pushed  open  the  glass  door  with  "Gibbons. 
Modes"  painted  on  it,  and  stepped  inside. 

A  bell  had  rung  somewhere  in  the  distance  as  she  opened 
the  door,  and  there  was  no  one  in  the  room  as  she  entered  it. 
But  she  hadn't  much  time  to  look  around — only  long  enough 
to  get  the  impression  that  the  place  was  somehow  overflowing 
with  hats — when  another  door  opened,  and  a  thin,  gray -haired, 
tight  little  woman  (she  had  a  tight  dress  and  tight  hair,  and 
her  joints,  when  she  moved,  seemed  to  be  tight,  too)  con 
fronted  her.  She  was  unmistakably  Miss  Gibbons  and  in  that 
first  glance,  Rose  liked  her.  Her  features  were  rather  too  big 
for  her  small  face — a  big  nose  not  finely  made,  a  wide  thin- 
lipped  mouth,  and  a  long  chin — and  her  eyes,  looking  very 
straight  out  through  gold-rimmed  spectacles,  had  a  penetrat 
ing  brightness  about  them  that  was  a  little  formidable.  It  was 
not  what  one  would  call  a  good-natured  face.  But  good- 


THE  CONQUEST  OF  CEXTROPOLIS    451 

natured  sentimentality  was  the  last  thing  Rose  "was  looking 
for. 

"What  can  I  do  for  you?"  she  asked.  Her  voice  was  as 
tight  and  brisk  as  the  rest  of  her. 

"I'm  looking  for  a  job,"  said  Hose. 

Miss  Gibbons  came  a  step  closer  and  her  bright  look  pierced 
a  little  more  deeply. 

"So !"  she  said.     "You're  the  actress,  are  you  ?" 

Rose  smiled  at  that.  "I'm  not  a  real  actress,"  she  said,  "but 
I'm  who  you  mean.  I  was  a  chorus-girl  with  that  company 
that  broke  down  here." 

"Why  didn't  you  go  away  when  the  rest  of  them  did  ?"  the 
milliner  demanded. 

"I  decided  I  didn't  want  to  go  on  being  a  chorus-girl,"  said 
Rose,  "and  I  thought  there  was  as  good  a  chance  of  getting 
other  work  here  as  in  Chicago." 

"That  was  a  sort  of  fool  idea,  I  guess,  wasn't  it?"  Miss 
Gibbons  suggested. 

"It  seems  so,  up  to  now,"  said  Rose.  "I  spent  the  morn 
ing  on  Main  Street  without  having  any  luck.  I  went  to  five 
places  ..." 

"Five?"  questioned  Miss  Gibbons.  "I  knew  about  Arthur 
Perkins  and  Sim  Laidlaw  and  Tabby  Parkes.  Who  were  the 
other  two  ?" 

Rose  couldn't  enlighten  her.     She'd  forgotten  their  names. 

"I've  had  work  offered  to  me,"  she  went  on,  "or  at  least 
suggested.  Mr.  Culver  at  the  hotel  told  me  of  a  moving- 
picture-  place  .  .  ." 

"Where  you  could  sit  in  that  glass  cage  of  Al  Zeider's  and 
sell  tickets?"  Miss  Gibbons  broke  in.  "Why  didn't  you  take 
it?" 

"I  told  Mr.  Culver,"  said  Rose,  "that  Fd  already  walked 
the  length  of  Main  Street  and  back,  and  that  was  enough  for 
me." 

"How  did  John  Culver  happen  to  say  anything  about  that? 
How  come  it  you  were  talking  to  him?" 

"I'd  asked  him  to  hire  me  as  a  waitress,"  said  Rose. 


452  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"And  I  reckon/'  said  Miss  Gibbons,  "that  he  told  you  he 
kept  a  respectable  hotel.  He  may  have  put  some  frills  on  it, 
but  that's  close  enough  to  go  on,  isn't  it?" 

Rose  nodded.  In  her  relief  at  finding  her  situation  so  well 
understood,  she  was  turning  a  little  limp. 

"Why  did  you  come  to  me  ?"  Miss  Gibbons  demanded.  "He 
never  would  have  thought  of  sending  you  here." 

Rose  braced  up  once  more  and  told  about  her  conversation 
with  Judge  Granger. 

This  time  the  milliner  heard  her  through. 

"And  so  the  judge  sent  you  to  me,"  she  said,  when  Rose 
had  finished.  "I  suppose  that  was  his  fool  idea  of  being 
funny.  He  thought  it  was  a  chance  to  get  me  poison  mad." 

Rose  nodded  a  little  wearily. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  "I  suppose  that  was  it." 

The  milliner  shot  out  a  sharp  glance  at  her.  "Sit  down," 
she  said  bruskly,  and  nodded  to  a  chair. 

Rose  didn't  much  want  to.  Her  instinct  was  to  stay  on  her 
feet  until  she'd  won  her  battle,  and  her  fatigue  only  height 
ened  it.  But  Miss  Gibbons  had  given  her  an  order  rather  than 
an  invitation,  and  she  obeyed  it. 

The  older  woman  didn't  sit  down. 

"Harvey  Granger,"  she  said  thoughtfully,  "will  never  for 
give  me  as  long  as  he  lives,  for  not  thinking  he's  a  great  man. 
That's  just  ridiculous,  of  course,  because  I  know  Harve.  Years 
ago,  you  see, — so  long  ago  that  everybody's  forgotten  it — my 
father  was  the  big  man  down  in  this  part  of  the  state.  He  was 
a  circuit  judge,  when  circuit  judges  amounted  to  something, 
and  he  was  one  of  the  best  of  them.  But  he  was  a  fool  about 
money  and  he  got  mixed  up  in  things — and  died.  I  was 
twenty-five  years  old  then,  and  I  took  to  hats. 

"Well,  Harve  Granger  was  my  father's  law-clerk  before  fa 
ther  was  elected  judge.  I  used  to  see  him  night  and  morning. 
And,  as  I  say,  I  know  him  all  the  way  through.  He  knows  I 
know  him,  and  that's  what  he  can't  get  over." 

There  was  a  little  silence  when  she  finished ;  a  silence  Rose's 
instinct  told  her  not  to  break.  Presently  the  little  woman 
wheeled  around  on  her. 


THE   CONQUEST    OF    CENTROPOLIS         453 

""Well,"  she  said,  "you  came  to  me  anyway,  though  you  saw 
the  judge  meant  it  for  a  joke.  Why  did  you  do  that?" 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Rose.    "I  thought  I  would." 

"And  you  haven't  told  me  yet/'  said  Miss  Gibbons,  "that 
you're  really  straight  and  respectable.  What  have  you  got  to 
say  about  that?" 

"Nothing  much,"  said  Rose.  "I  am  straight  and  respectable. 
But  I  suppose  a  woman  who  wasn't  would  pretend  to  be.  So 
you  will  have  to  decide  about  that  for  yourself." 

"Hmpli!"  grunted  Miss  Gibbons.  "I  don't  know  why  I 
asked  a  fool  question  like  that,  unless  it's  because,  like  the  rest 
of  them,  I  live  in  Centropolis.  I  know  what  you  are,  as  well 
as  you  do  yourself." 

The  words  were  brusk,  and  the  inflection  of  them  not  much 
gentler,  but  they  fell  on  Rose's  heart  like  rain ;  like  an  unex 
pected  warm  little  shower  out  of  a  brazen  sky.  She  caught 
her  breath,  and,  to  her  consternation,  felt  her  eyes  flushing  up 
with  tears.  She  hadn't  realized  the  tension  she  had  been  un 
der,  until  it  was  relaxed.  She  gave  a  shaky  half-suppressed 
sob  and  then  made  a  desperate  effort  to  pull  herself  together. 

"Now,  look  here !"  said  Miss  Gibbons,  in  a  tone  harder  and 
dryer  than  ever.  "I'm  not  going  to  take  you  in  and  pay  you 
wages  just  because  you're  a  cat  in  a  strange  garret  and  don't 
know  where  to  turn.  I'm  not  even  going  to  do  it  to  spite 
Harve  Granger.  But,  if  you've  got  any  sort  of  gumption 
about  hats,  I  am  going  to  do  it,  and  the  rest  of  this  fool  town 
can  say  what  it  likes  and  do  what  it  pleases.  So  the  thing 
for  you  to  do  is  to  quiet  down  sensibly  and  show  me  whether 
you  can  trim  a  hat." 

It  took  Rose  a  few  minutes  to  carry  out  the  first  part  of  this 
injunction.  The  rush  of  relief  and  gratitude  and  happiness 
shook  her.  Given  carte  blanche  to  design  a  special  angel  from 
Heaven  to  come  down  and  give  her  just  the  comfort  and  en 
couragement  she  wanted,  she  couldn't  have  imagined  one  so 
good  as  Miss  Gibbons, — with  those  keen  straight-looking  eyes 
that  had  observed  her  fellow  citizens  of  Centropolis  for  the 
last  half-century  or  so,  not  in  vain ;  with  her  courageous  com 
mon  sense,  and  with  that  dry,  cool,  astringent  manner,  which 


454  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

lay  with  a  pleasant  healing  sting  on  the  lacerations  of  Rose's 
soul. 

For  a  while  she  just  sat  still  and  tried  to  get  the  catch  out 
of  her  breathing.  At  last,  when  she  thought  she  could  trust 
her  voice  not  to  break  absurdly,  she  smiled  and  said : 

"What  sort  of  hat  do  you  want  me  to  trim?  I  mean,  for 
what  sort  of  person  ?" 

"What  sort  of  person !"  echoed  Miss  Gibbons  and  gave  Rose 
a  rather  keen  look.  "Why,"  she  said,  after  hesitating  a  mo 
ment,  "there's  a  silly  old  maid  in  this  town.  She  ain't  more 
than  ten  years  younger  than  I  am,  but  her  hair's  stayed  sort 
of  fluffy  and  yellow,  and  she's  kept  part  of  her  looks,  though 
not  near  as  much  of  them  as  she  thinks.  She  was  a  beautiful 
girl  at  twenty,  I'll  say  that  for  her.  None  of  these  girls  now 
compares  with  her.  But  she  was  a  little  too  sure  of  herself  and 
took  too  long  deciding  among  the  young  men  of  this  town, 
until  all  at  once,  she  found  that  nobody  wanted  her.  She's 
been  trying  ever  since  to  show  she  doesn't  care ;  and  she  pesters 
the  life  out  of  me  twice  a  year  trying  to  fit  her  out  with  a 
hat.  I  won't  let  her  go  around  the  streets  looking  like  a  giddy 
young  fool,  and  that's  what  she's  determined  to  do.  So,  if  you 
can  suit  her  and  me,  you  will  be  doing  pretty  well." 

The  description  made  a  picture  for  Rose.  She  saw  the 
faded  pathetic  prettiness  of  the  woman  who'd  looked  too  long 
and  had  been  trying  to  pretend  for  the  last  fifteen  years  or 
so  that  she  didn't  care.  And  the  picture  in  her  mind's  eye 
was  surmounted  by  a  hat;  a  hat  that  conceded  some  of  the 
years  Miss  Gibbons  had  insisted  on,  and  that  her  client  was 
unwilling  to  acknowledge,  and  yet  retained  a  sort  of  jaunti- 
ness. 

She  didn't  know  whether  she  could  execute  the  thing  she 
saw  or  not,  out  of  the  stock  of  materials  at  her  disposal.  But 
it  hadn't  cost  her  a  thought  or  an  effort  to  see  the  hat. 

"All  right,"  she  said  after  a  bit.  "I'll  see  what  I  can  do. 
If  you'll  show  me  where  the  things  are  .  .  ." 

It  was  a  much  humbler  sort  of  job,  of  course,  designing  a 
hat  for  a  middle-aged  village  spinster,  than  making  those 
dozen  gowns  for  Goldsmith  and  Block  had  been.  But  this 


THE    CONQUEST    OF    CENTBOPOUS         455 

consideration  never  occurred  to  her.  She  found,  and  was  not 
even  amazed  to  find,  the  same  thrill  of  exhilaration  in  con 
quering  the  small  problem,  that  she  had  found  in  the  larger 
one.  She  worked  with  the  same  swift  unconscious  economy 
of  labor  and  materials. 

At  the  end  of  two  hours,  she  presented  the  result  of  her 
labors  for  the  milliner's  approval. 

Miss  Gibbons  surveyed  it  with  a  smile  of  ironic  apprecia 
tion. 

"It  isn't  what  I'd  call  a  real  finished  job,"  she  commented 
after  a  minute  inspection  of  some  of  the  details  of  Rose's  sew 
ing.  "I  wouldn't  trust  it  in  a  high  wind  not  to  scatter  all 
the  way  from  here  to  the  Presbyterian  church.  But  it  will 
certainly  suit  Agatha  Stebbins." 

She  looked  at  it  a  while  longer.  "And  I  don't  know,"  she 
concluded  a  little  reluctantly,  "as  it'll  look  so  all-mighty  fool 
ish  on  her,  either.  Will  ten  dollars  a  week  suit  you  to  begin 
on?" 

"Yes,"  said  Rose,  "that  will  suit  me  very  well  indeed." 

"All  right,"  said  Miss  Gibbons.  "That's  settled.  There's 
one  more  thing  to  settle  now,  and  that's  where  you're  going 
to  live." 

Rose  contemplated  this  question  a  little  blankly  for  a  mo 
ment. 

"Do  you  suppose,"  she  said,  "there's  any  place  in  this  town 
where  I  can  live;  where  they'd  take  a  person  like  me?  Or 
would  it  be  all  right,  if  you  asked  them?" 

"Oh,  I  guess,"  said  Miss  Gibbons,  "we  could  most  likely 
find  somebody.  I'll  think  about  it." 

She  gave  Rose  some  work  to  do  and  didn't  refer  to  the  mat 
ter  again  till  nearly  six  o'clock. 

"I've  been  thinking,"  she  said  then,  "that  I've  got  room  for 
a  boarder  myself.  There's  a  little  room  back  here  that  I  don't 
use ;  there's  a  black  girl  does  me  out  and  cooks  my  dinner  and 
supper,  and  I  get  my  own  breakfast.  The  girl  could  cook  for 
two  as  well  as  one,  and  I  guess  I  could  feed  you  for  two  dol 
lars  a  week.  If  that  ain't  satisfactory,  you  can  just  rray  so." 

"Satisfactory!"  said  Rose,  and  once  more  her  voice  broke. 


456  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

"All  right,"  said  Miss  Gibbons  hastily,  "we'll  say  no  more 
about  it.  That's  settled.  I'll  send  the  girl  to  the  hotel  to  get 
your  bags." 

John  Galbraith's  letter  asking  Rose  to  report  to  him  July 
first  in  New  York,  reached  her  via  Portia,  during  the  last 
week  in  June,  and  made  an  abrupt  conclusion  to  her  life  at 
Centropolis. 

Those  weeks  with  Miss  Gibbons  in  the  millinery  parlor, 
when  she  looked  back  on  them  afterward,  set  in  as  they  were 
between  that  purgatorial  winter  and  the  first  breathless 
months  while  she  was  establishing  herself  in  New  York,  had 
a  quality  of  happiness  and  peace,  which  she  was  wont  to  de 
scribe  as  heavenly. 

She'd  probably  have  taken  to  Miss  Gibbons  in  any  circum 
stance.  But,  coming  into  her  life  just  when  she  did,  the  little 
woman  was  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock  to  her.  She  was  in  a 
state,  when  she  settled  down  in  the  milliner's  spare  back  room 
over  the  drug-store,  where  all  the  warmer  emotions  seemed 
terrible  to  her.  It  was  Rodney's  love  for  her  and  hers  for  him, 
that  had  bruised  and  lacerated  her ;  that  had  made  the  winter 
months  a  long  torment,  unmitigated  during  the  last  of  them, 
by  any  form  of  adequate  self-expression.  The  two  parodies  on 
love  which  had  been  thrust  into  her  face  just  at  the  end,  Olga 
Larson's  inverted  form  of  it  toward  herself,  and  Dolly's 
shabby  little  romance,  had  given  her  an  absolute  loathing  for 
it.  To  her,  in  that  condition,  any  expression  of  friendship 
that  was  warm  and  soft,  and  in  the  least  sentimental,  would 
have  been  almost  unendurable  to  her.  Miss  Gibbons,  in  that 
acrid  antiseptic  way  of  hers,  simply  washed  her  soul  in  cold 
water  and  clothed  it  again  in  the  garments  of  self-respect. 

Her  manner  to  Rose,  even  as  their  friendship  ripened  and 
grew  more  confident,  never  changed.  Nor  did  the  manner  Rose 
adopted  toward  her.  Their  endless  talks  resulted  in  a  good  deal 
of  self-revelation,  but  this  was  never  direct.  Miss  Gibbons 
never  again  came  as  near  to  a  confidential  account  of  her  life, 
as  she  did  on  that  first  afternoon,  when  she  explained  the  thor 
oughness  of  her  acquaintance  with  Judge  Granger.  And  Rose 


THE  CONQUEST  OF  CEXTEOPOLIS    457 

never  explained  how  it  had  happened  that  she  was  left  at  the 
mercy  of  the  town  of  Centropolis  by  the  failure  of  The  Girl 
Up-stairs  company.  But  she  poured  out  for  her  friend  a 
wealth  of  illustrative  reminiscences,  drawn  from  her  child 
hood,  her  days  at  the  university,  her  life  on  the  stage;  and 
though  she  was  a  good  deal  more  reticent  about  it,  she  even 
touched  on  her  married  life  with  Eodney ;  at  least,  on  the  col 
lateral  incidents  of  it. 

Miss  Gibbons  listened  to  all  this  with  a  hunger  she  didn't 
conceal,  and  this  eagerness  gave  Eose  a  pretty  vivid  picture 
of  the  inner  life  the  little  woman  had  lived  here  in  Centropo 
lis. 

If  she'd  been  born  a  boy  instead  of  a  girl,  she'd  probably 
have  equaled,  or  outstripped,  Eose  thought,  her  father's  emi 
nence.  With  her  courage,  her  vitality,  her  fine  penetrating 
intelligence,  she'd  have  managed  to  win  her  way  out  of  this 
stagnant  little  back-water  of  life.  But,  having  been  born  a 
girl,  brought  up  helpless,  as  became  the  daughter  of  the  circuit 
judge,  and  then  having  had  this  support  wrenched  from  un 
der  her  at  the  critical  moment,  there  had  been  nothing  for 
her  but — hats. 

She'd  never  gone  sour,  at  that;  never,  apparently,  wasted 
any  hours  in  repining.  She'd  made,  after  a  fashion,  a  career 
of  hats;  had  risen  on  them,  to  a  position  of  acknowledged  so 
cial  consequence.  There  must  have  been  disquieting  echoes 
in  her,  rhythms  that  answered  to  the  pulsation  of  an  ampler 
life.  She  never  could  hope  to  get  out  into  it,  she  undoubtedly 
knew,  but  she  took  every  opportunity  she  could  get  for  a 
glimpse  at  it.  Eose's  incursion  into  her  life  must  have  been 
a  godsend  to  her. 

She  probably  pieced  together  a  pretty  good  picture  of  Eose, 
too.  But  she  did  this  piecing  in  silence  and  kept  her  sur 
mises  to  herself. 

In  a  material  way,  her  adoption  of  Eose  was  an  immense 
success.  Centropolis,  when  it  learned  the  news,  was  thunder 
struck.  For  a  matter  of  hours,  one  might  say,  the  town  held 
its  breath.  Then  it  began  to  talk.  The  women  began  asking 
questions:  What  did  the  actress  look  like?  The  men  offered 


458  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

lame  descriptions.  Rose  had  been  seen,  apparently,  that  morn 
ing  on  Main  Street,  by  the  entire  male  population,  but  their 
descriptions  weren't  satisfactory.  Curiosity  must  be  assuaged  ! 
But  Rose  never  went  into  the  stores  on  Main  Street;  never 
patronized  the  picture-show,  and  even  had  these  glimpses  been 
afforded,  they'd  have  been  pretty  unsatisfactory.  There  was 
only  one  real  way  of  discovering  what  the  creature  was  like; 
discovering  for  yourself,  that  is — and  hearsay  evidence  is  no 
toriously  unreliable;  that  was  to  buy  a  hat  of  Lizzie  Gibbons. 

The  first  daring  adventurer  was  Agatha  Stebbins.  Agatha 
found,  you  will  remember,  the  hat  Rose  had  already  designed 
for  her.  And,  as  Miss  Gibbons  caustically  disclaimed  the 
authorship  of  it  ("I'd  never  have  made  you  up  a  thing  like 
that,  you  can  believe !")  and  as  Miss  Stebbins,  after  a  mo 
ment's  hesitation,  decided  she  adored  it,  another  inducement, 
though  perhaps  a  superfluous  one,  was  offered  for  visits  to  the 
atelier. 

"Of  course  she  isn't  what  you  could  call  genteel,"  Miss  Steb 
bins  explained,  parading  her  acquisition,  "and  she's  never  had 
any  advantages.  And  as  to  her  moral  character,  I  suppose  the 
less  said  the  better.  Lizzie  Gibbons  can  settle  that  question 
with  her  own  conscience.  But  when  it  comes  to  hats  she's  got 
more  gimp  in  her  little  finger  than  Lizzie's  got  in  both  hands. 
Dear,  no!  She's  not  what  I  call  pretty.  Not  with  a  mouth 
like  that.  Of  course  the  men  .  .  ." 

So  Miss  Gibbons'  spring  business  was  distended  to  unrecog 
nizable  proportions.  Rose  fitted  on  hats  in  the  show-room 
during  business  hours  and  took  a  mischievous  delight  in  the 
assumption  of  the  intangible  manner  of  a  perfect  shop-assist 
ant;  in  saying  "Yes,  madam,"  and  "No,  madam,"  and  "Will 
you  try  this,  madam?"  with  a  perfection  of  politeness  that 
baffled  the  most  determined  curiosity.  Miss  Gibbons  got  as 
much  fun  out  of  it  as  she  did. 

The  hours  in  the  workroom  were  pleasant  ones,  too,  with 
their  perpetual  reminder  that  the  creative  power  that  had 
deserted  her  last  January,  had  come  back.  The  little  problems 
were  ludicrously  easy,  of  course  but  they  stimulated  a  pleas 
ant  sense  of  reserve  power. 


THE    CONQUEST    OP    CENTBOPOLIS         459 

She  couldn't,  of  course,  have  stayed  in  Centropolis  indefi 
nitely.  In  time,  that  feeling  of  mounting  energy  would  have 
driven  her  out  in  search  of  something  that  would  test  it. 

But,  when  Galbraith's  letter  came,  it  took  her  a  little  aback. 
Miss  Gibbons  had  brought  it  in;  because  Eose,  even  then, 
didn't  go  to  the  post-office.  Miss  Gibbons  watched  her  tear 
open  the  big  envelope  addressed  to  Eose  in  the  handwriting 
that  always  went  with  the  California  post-mark,  and  saw  her 
take  another  unopened  letter  out  of  it.  She  saw  the  girl's  face 
set  itself  in  a  sudden  gravity ;  watched  her  with  a  hungry  mis 
giving,  while  she  read  the  enclosure,  and  felt  the  misgiving 
mount  to  an  unhappy  certainty,  when  Eose  put  it  away  with 
out  comment 

But  Eose  wasn't  certain,  or  she  felt  that  night  when  she 
went  to  bed  that  she  was  not.  Galbraith's  letter  frightened 
her  a  little.  It  was  a  dictated  letter,  very  stiff,  wholly  busi 
nesslike.  It  offered  to  make  her  his  personal  assistant  at  a 
salary  of  fifty  dollars  a  week.  He  summarized  in  rather  formi 
dable  terms,  what  her  duties  would  be.  He  wished  her  to  re 
port  to  him  promptly,  July  first,  and  to  telegraph  him  at  her 
earliest  convenience,  whether  she  accepted  his  offer.  There 
was  no  explanation  of  his  long  delay  in  sending  for  her. 

Eose  had  no  illusions  as  to  what  its  acceptance  would  mean. 
It  would  mean  gripping  life  again  with  the  full  strength  of 
both  hands.  It  would  mean  many  anxious  days  and  sleepless 
nights.  It  would  mean  spurring  herself  to  a  high  degree  of 
competency.  You  didn't  get  fifty  dollars  a  week  for  anything 
that  was  easy  to  do.  She  knew  that  now,  by  hard  experience. 
And  then  the  transplantation  to  New  York  would  mean  an 
end  of  the  cool  healing  peace  of  her  present  life.  Things 
would  begin  happening  to  her  that  she  couldn't  foresee  nor 
control.  Feelings  would  begin  happening  to  her;  the  kind  of 
feelings  that  scorched  and  terrified  you.  They  wouldn't  hap 
pen  to  her  here  in  Centropolis. 

She  fell  asleep  that  night  under  the  persuasion  that  the 
thing  wasn't  decided;  that  the  safe,  quiet,  peaceful  way  was 
still  open  to  her.  But  when  she  awakened  in  the  morning, 
she  knew  it  was  not. 


460 

"I  surmise,"  said  Miss  Gibbons  that  morning  at  breakfast, 
"that  you're  figuring  to  go  away." 

Eose  smiled  and  sighed.  "I  don't  know  how  you  guess 
things  like  that,"  she  said,  "but  it's  true.  I  must  be  in  New 
York  on  the  first  of  July." 

"Well,  the  sooner  the  quicker,"  said  Miss  Gibbons  dryly. 
"You  came  all  at  once  and  I  guess  it's  just  as  well  you  should 
go  the  same  way.  I  guess  neither  of  us  is  sorry  you  came,  and 
I  hope  you'll  never  be  sorry  you  went." 

That  was  her  nearest  approach  to  an  affectionate  farewell. 
Eose  managed  to  express  her  affection  and  gratitude  a  little 
more  adequately,  but  not  much.  "It  isn't  the  end  of  us,  you 
know,"  she  concluded.  "You're  coming  to  see  me  in  New 
York." 

Miss  Gibbons  smiled  with  good-humored  skepticism  at  that. 

Eose  telegraphed  Galbraith  that  morning,  and  she  took  the 
noon  train  for  St.  Louis.  She  needed  a  day  or  two  there  to 
make  the  modest  supplements  to  her  wardrobe  that  her  sav 
ings  permitted. 


BOOK  FOUR 

The  Real  Adventure 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  TUNE  CHANGES 

JOHN  WILLIAMSON'S  doctor  packed  him  off  to  Carlsbad 
just  about  the  time  that  Rose  achieved  the  conquest  of  Cen- 
tropolis  (along  in  April,  1914,  that  was).  Violet  and  their 
one  child,  a  girl  of  twelve,  went  along  with  him  to  keep 
him  company;  at  rather  long  range,  it  seemed,  because  they 
were  both  in  Paris  on  the  first  of  August,  when  the  war  broke 
out,  and  John  spent  six  frantic  days  getting  into  Switzerland 
and  out  again  into  France,  before  his  attempt  to  join  them 
was  successful.  They  had  run  the  full  gamut  of  refugees' 
experiences,  by  the  time  they  got  to  England  and  secured 
accommodations  on  a  liner  to  New  York,  and  the  tale  got  an 
added  touch  from  the  stratagem  Violet  employed  in  success 
fully  bringing  off  all  her  new  French  frocks. 

It  took  just  two  hours'  steady  talking  to  tell  the  story,  and 
Violet  figured  that  during  the  first  week  after  her  return  to 
Chicago,  she  told  it  on  an  average  of  three  times  a  day.  So 
that  by  the  time  she  could  manage  a  day  for  motoring  out 
to  Lake  Forest  to  see  Constance  Crawford,  she  was  ready  to 
talk  about  something  else. 

Constance  had  lately  had  her  fourth — and  she  asserted,  last 
— baby,  and  wasn't  seeing  anybody  yet,  except  intimates,  one 
at  a  time;  and  she  relaxed  a  little  deeper,  with  a  sigh  of  relief, 
into  her  cushioned  chair,  when  Violet  said : 

"The  same  things  happened  to  us  that  happened  to  every 
body  else,  so  you  don't  have  to  hear  them.  Oh,  it  was  nice,  in 
a  way,  being  separated  from  poor  John  when  the  thing  hap 
pened,  because — well,  he  hasn't  got  over  it  yet.  He's  still  more 
as  he  was  when  we  were  first  engaged,  than  he's  ever  been 
since.  And  at  thirty-seven  that's  something!  And  then  it's 
a  satisfaction  about  the  clothes.  It  seems  as  if  I  must  have 

463 


464  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

had  a  premonition  that  something  was  going  to  happen,  be 
cause  I  bought  absolutely  everything  I  wanted. 

"Of  course  it  was  an  awful  moment  when  John  said  we 
couldn't  take  anything  but  hand-luggage.  But  I  got  three 
perfectly  enormous  straw-telescopes — you  know  the  kind — 
about  four  feet  long,  and  then  we  left  everything  else  behind, 
except  a  tooth-brush  and  a  comb  apiece.  And  what  with  that 
and  the  biggest  hat  box  in  the  world — my,  but  it's  lucky  hats 
are  small ! — we  managed  it. 

"But  all  the  stuff  about  having  your  automobile  taken  away 
and  riding  in  a  cart,  and  thinking  you're  going  to  be  arrested 
as  a  spy,  and  living  for  days  on  milk-chocolate  and  vin  ordi 
naire,  you've  heard  it  all  a  hundred  times  already,  so  we'll 
talk  about  something  else/' 

"I  never  heard  anything  so  heroic  in  my  life,"  Constance 
said.  "But  you  don't  need  to  be,  because  I'm  perishing  for 
details. — Unless,"  she  went  on,  "it  isn't  heroism  at  all,  but 
something  else  you  want  to  talk  about." 

"Just  my  luck !"  said  Violet.  "I  thought  I  was  going  to 
get  away  with  that.  There  is  something  I'm  frantic  with  curi 
osity  about,  and  you're  the  first  person  I've  seen  I  could  ask. 
I  spent  two  hours  trying  to  get  up  my  courage  with  Frederica, 
but  I  couldn't.  Do  you  know  anything  about  them — Eose  and 
Eodney?  Does  any  one  know  anything  about  her  since  she 
disappeared  from  the  Globe  ?" 

"Why,  I  fancy  they  do,"  said  Constance,  "Eodney  and 
Frederica.  I  don't  know  just  why  I  think  so.  Frank  sees 
Eodney  every  day  or  two  at  lunch  time  at  the  club;  says  he 
seems  all  right.  He's  working  terribly  hard.  And  the  money 
he's  making!  Frank  says  he's  a  regular  robber  in  the  fees  he 
asks — and  gets.  He  sa}7s  he  speaks  of  Eose  once  in  a  while, 
and  not — at  least  not  exactly,  as  if  she  were  dead.  You  know 
what  I  mean !  Just  in  that  maddening,  matter-of-course  way, 
as  if  everybody  knew  all  about  her. 

"Frederica  won't  talk  about  her  at  all.  I  mean,  she  won't 
start  the  subject,  and  nobody  has  the  nerve  to  start  it  with  her. 
Freddy  can  be  like  that,  you  know.  She'd  make  a  perfectly 
wonderful  queen — did  you  ever  think  of  that?  Of  England. 


THE    TUNE    CHANGES  465 

Harriet's  the  only  one  who'd  talk,  and  of  course  she's  gone 
back.  You  knew  that,  didn't  you?  Oh,  but  naturally,  since 
you've  talked  to  Freddy." 

Violet  nodded.  "It  all  sounded  so  exactly  like  Harriet," 
she  said,  "as  Freddy  told  about  it.  No  confidences,  no  flutters. 
She  didn't  even  seem  interested  until  the  day  England  went 
in.  And  then  at  lunch  that  day,  she  said  to  Frederica,  'I've 
just  cabled  Tony  that  I'm  coming  back  on  the  next  boat.  And 
I  telephoned  Eodney  just  now,  to  find  out  what  the  next  boat 
for  Genoa  was,  or  Naples,  and  get  me  a  stateroom.  Lend  me 
Marie,  will  you,  to  help  pack?  Because  I'll  probably  have  to 
take  the  five-thirty.'  Harriet  all  over.  Well,  on  the  whole,  I'm 
glad." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Constance.  "She'd  always  be  at  a  loose  end 
in  this  country.  She  doesn't  believe  in  divorce.  She  might,  of 
course,  if  she  fell  in  love  with  another  man  over  here.  But 
that's  not  likely  to  happen.  And  she  can't  stand  America  any 
more.  So  even  an  unsuccessful  marriage  over  there,  especially 
if  Italy  gets  drawn  into  the  war,  and  her  man  gets  .  .  ." 

"Constance !"  cried  Violet,  horrified. 

"Oh,  not  necessarily  killed,"  Constance  went  on.  "Crippled 
or  something,  or  even  if  he  really  got  interested  in  the  profes 
sion  of  being  a  soldier.  She's  done  well  to  go  back  to  him." 

"Anyway,  that  wasn't  what  I  meant,"  said  Violet.  "I  meant 
I  was  glad  for  Rodney  and — Rose.  Mind  you,  I  don't  know 
a  single  thing.  But  I've  just  got  a  hunch  that  with  Harriet 
oft'  the  board,  it  will  be  a  little  more  possible  for  those  two  to 
get  together." 

Constance  looked  at  her  intently.  "You've  changed  your 
tune,"  she  said.  "I  thought  you  were  through  with  Rose  for 
good  and  all.  I  thought  what  you  were  rooting  for  was  a  di 
vorce  and  a  fresh  start  for  Rodney." 

"I  thought  so,  too,"  said  Violet,  "until  I  saw  her." 

"Saw  her !"  Constance  cried.  "Where?  When?" 

"In  New  York  on  the  way  home,"  s«id  Violet. 

"Well — tell  me  all  about  it,"  said  Constance,  when  she  saw 
Violet  wasn't  going  on  of  her  own  accord.  "You,  pretending 
you  wanted  to  know  about  everything,  and  pretending  to  be 


466  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

a  heroine  for  not  telling  me  all  about  being  a  refugee !  What 
is  she  doing  ?  What  did  she  look  like  ?  What  did  she  say  ?" 

"You've  changed  your  tune,  too/'  said  Violet.  "Because 
you  were  through  with  her  just  as  much  as  I  was.  You  didn't 
want  to  hear  anything  more  about  her.  Of  course  she  could 
run  away  and  go  on  the  stage  if  she  liked,  you  said,  but  she'd 
better  not  try  to  come  back." 

Constance  pointed  out  that  she  hadn't,  as  yet,  expressed  the 
hope  that  Rodney  would  make  it  up  with  her.  But  she  pleaded 
guilty  to  a  strong  curiosity. 

"Well,  I  can't  tell  you  much,"  said  Violet.  "John  and  I 
were  coming  down  Fifth  Avenue  in  a  taxi  one  afternoon,  and 
were  stopped  by  the  traffic  at  Forty-fourth  Street.  And  right 
there,  in  another  taxi,  was  Rose.  I  didn't  see  her  till  just  as 
we  got  the  whistle  to  go  ahead.  I  was  so  surprised  I  could  only 
grab  John  and  tell  him  to  look.  I  did  shriek  at  her  at  last, 
and  she  saw  us  and  lighted  up  and  smiled.  Just  that  old  smile 
of  hers,  you  know.  But  her  car  was  turning  west,  down  past 
Sherry's,  and  we  were  going  straight  ahead  and  we  weren't 
quick  enough  to  tell  the  chauffeur  to  turn,  too.  We  did  turn 
on  Forty -third  and  came  around  the  block,  and  of  course  we 
missed  her. 

"We  went  to  three  musical  shows  in  the  next  two  days,  in 
the  hope  of  spotting  her  in  the  chorus.  But  she  wasn't  in  any 
of  them,  and  then  I  simply  dragged  John  home.  There  was 
no  way  of  finding  her  of  course,  nor  of  her  finding  us,  because 
John's  given  up  the  Holland  House  at  last  and  taken  to  the 
Vanderbilt.  But  it  was  rather  maddening." 

"Well,  I  don't  know,"  said  Constance.  "Oh,  yes,  maddening 
of  course,  because  one  would  be  curious.  But  that  sort  of  curi 
osity  might  prove  pretty  expensive  if  you  gratified  it.  Talk 
about  the  clutch  of  a  drowning  person !  It's  nothing  to  the 
clutch  of  a  declassec  woman.  And  if  she's  been  somebody  once 
who  really  mattered,  and  somebody  you  were  really  fond  of 
.  .  .  Because  it  is  no  use.  They  can't  ever  come  back." 

Violet  stirred  in  her  chair.  "Of  course  we're  all  perfectly 
good  Christians,"  she  observed  ironically.  "And  once  a  week 
we  say  'Forgive  us  our  debts/  besides  teaching  it  to  the  kids." 


THE    TUNE    CHANGES  467 

Constance  broke  in  on  her  hotly.  "Oh,  come,  Violet !  You 
know  it's  not  a  question  of  forgiveness.  I  don't  claim  any 
moral  superiority  over  Eose.  I'm  just  talking  about  her  so 
cial  possibility.  A  person  who  does  an  outrageous  thing,  know 
ing  it's  outrageous,  just  because  he — or  she — wants  to  do  it, 
can  be  downright  immoral  without  being  impossible.  But  a 
person  who's  done  the  other  sort  of  thing,  a  shabby  thing — 
and  what  Rose  did  was  shabby — will  always  be  on  the  defen 
sive  about  it.  They  can't  let  it  alone.  They're  always  making 
references  you  can't  ignore;  always  seeing  references  in  per 
fectly  harmless  things  tbat  other  people  say.  And  the  only 
society  where  they're  ever  happy,  is  that  of  a  lot  of  other  peo 
ple  with  shady,  shabby  things  that  they're  on  the  defensive 
about.  And  they  all  get  together  and  call  it  Bohemia.  And 
they  sprawl  around  in  studios  and  talk  about  sex  and  try  to 
feel  superior  and  emancipated.  Well,  maybe  they  are.  All  I 
say  is  they  don't  belong  with  us.  Oh,  you  know  it's  true !  You 
hate  that  as  much  as  I  do." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Violet.  "Only,  since  I've  seen  Eose — even 
for  that  minute — it  doesn't  seem  possible  to  apply  it  to  her. 
You  know,  I  don't  believe  she's  on  the  stage  any  more." 

Constance  asked  with  good-humored  satire,  "Why?  From 
the  way  she  looked  in  the  taxi-cab  ?" 

"Yes,"  said  Violet.  "Just  from  that.  There  she  was  in  an 
open  taxi,  on  Fifth  Avenue,  at  half  past  four  in  the  afternoon, 
and  she  didn't  look  somehow,  as  if  how  she  looked  mattered. 
She  wasn't  on  parade  a  bit.  She  looked  smart  and  successful, 
but  busy.  Not  exactly  irritated  at  being  held  up  in  the  block, 
but  keen  to  get  out  of  it.  The  way  Frank  or  John  would  look 
on  the  way  to  a  directors'  meeting.  And  the  way  she  smiled 
when  she  saw  us  ...  It's  not  quite  exactly  her  old  smile, 
either,  but  it's  just  as  fascinating.  It  pleased  her  to  see  us  all 
right.  But  as  for  her  caring  a  rap  what  we  thought — well, 
you  couldn't  imagine  it.  Defensive  indeed !  And  poor  old 
John  just  about  went  out  of  his  head  with  disappointment 
when  we  lost  her." 

"Oh,  I'll  never  deny  she's  a  charmer,"  said  Constance.  "All 
the  same 


468  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

"You  wait  till  you  see  her !"  said  Violet. 

Violet's  report  of  the  glimpse  she  had  had  of  Rose,  together 
with  what  were  felt  to  be  the  rather  amusingly  extravagant  set 
of  deductions  she  had  made  from  it,  spread  in  diminishing 
ripples  of  discussion  through  all  their  circle.  And  then,  con 
centrically,  into  wider  circles.  Most  of  their  own  intimate 
group  took  Constance's  attitude.  Forced  to  concede  a  lively 
curiosity  as  to  what  had  become  of  Rose,  they  still  professed 
that  the  way  of  discretion  lay  not  in  gratifying  it;  at  least  not 
at  first-hand.  When  they  were  in  New  York,  they  kept  an  eye 
open  for  a  sight  of  her,  on  the  stage  and  elsewhere,  and  an 
alert  ear  for  news,  finding  a  sort  of  fearful  joy  in  wondering 
what  they  would  do  if  an  encounter  took  place.  They  were 
mildly  derisive  with  Violet  over  her  volte-face. 

Secretly,  Violet  was  a  good  deal  closer  to  agreeing  with 
them  than  she'd  admit.  For,  as  the  effect  of  her  encounter 
lost  its  vividness,  with  the  recession  of  the  encounter  itself, 
she  began  to  suspect  that  she  had  gone  unwarranted  lengths 
in  her  interpretations  from  it.  But  under  fire,  she  stuck  to 
her  guns.  Her  husband,  who  delighted  in  her  public  attitude, 
was  amazed  when  she  rounded  upon  him  in  their  domestic 
sanctuary,  and  emphatically  took  the  other  side.  In  his  dis 
gust,  he  made  a  very  penetrating  observation,  whose  cogency 
Violet  realized,  though  she  loftily  ignored  it  at  the  time  it 
was  uttered.  But  three  or  four  nights  later,  at  an  opera  din 
ner  at  the  Heaton-Duncans,  she  fired  it  off  shamelessly,  as  a 
shot  out  of  her  own  locker. 

"It's  all  very  well,"  she  exploded,  "to  say  that  Rose  can't 
come  back.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  she's  never  been  out  of  it. 
At  least  the  hole  she  left  has  never  closed  up.  You  all  agree 
that  she's  to  be  forgotten  and  treated  as  a  regrettable  incident, 
but  you  keep  on  talking  about  her.  It's  like  Roosevelt.  There 
she  is  all  the  time." 

She  didn't  dare  catch  John's  eye  for  the  next  twenty  min 
utes,  but  she  knew  precisely,  without  looking,  the  exasperated 
quality  of  his  stare. 

It  was  true.  They  couldn't  let  her  alone.  Speculation  flared 
up  again,  and  this  time  with  a  justifiable  basis,  when  it  be- 


THE    TUNE    CHANGES  469 

came  known  that  Rodney  had  bought  the  McCrea  house; 
bought  it  outright,  for  cash,  with  its  complete  contents. 

Of  course  everybody  knew  that  Rodney  was  getting  rich. 
And  he  was  doing  it,  as  Frank  Crawford  pointed  out  to  Con 
stance,  with  precisely  the  same  contemptuous  disregard  of 
money  that  he  had  shown  before  his  marriage. 

"He  doesn't  care  what  he  charges,  and  he  didn't  care  then. 
Only  then  it  was  out  of  the  little  end  of  the  horn,  and  now  it's 
out  of  the  big.  And  the  thing  that  seems  to  make  him  particu 
larly  wild  is  that  the  higher  the  price  he  puts  on  his  opinions, 
the  more  people  there  are  who  think  that  nobody's  opinion 
but  his  is  any  good.  So  he  just  grins  at  them  and  goes  up  an 
other  notch.  He's  no  better  a  lawyer,  he  says,  than  he  was 
when  his  practise  brought  him  in  ten  thousand  a  year.  Of 
course  he  is  a  better  lawyer.  He's  getting  better  all  the  time. 
He  does  deliver  the  goods.  And  fighting  out  these  great  big 
cases  really  educates  a  man.  You  can't  be  really  first-class  un 
less  you've  got  first-class  things  to  do.  And  down  inside  Rod 
ney  knows  that  as  well  as  anybody. 

"Only,  with  all  his  money,  after  the  way  he's  talked  about 
that  house — the  way  he's  damned  it  and  made  fun  of  it,  what 
did  he  want  to  go  and  buy  it  for?" 

Constance  had  an  idea  he'd  got  it  at  a  bargain.  The  Mc- 
Creas  had  made  a  flying  trip  home  just  to  sell  it.  Their  in 
vestments  had  gone  off,  it  seemed,  still  further,  and  besides, 
Florence  had  at  last  found  something  in  the  world  to  be  in 
earnest  about,  and  that  was  in  France ;  the  American  hospital. 
Florence  had  already  taken  an  emergency  training  course  in 
nursing.  Her  husband,  whose  one  marked  talent  was  that  of 
a  chauffeur,  was  going  to  drive  a  motor  ambulance,  and  they 
were  both  on  fire  to  get  back  to  Paris  into  the  thick  of  things. 
Almost  any  round  sum,  in  absolutely  spot  cash,  would  satisfy 
them.  So  Rodney,  too  busy  with  other  things  to  take  the  trou 
ble  to  invest  his  money,  would  have  been  in  a  position  to  get 
the  house  cheap.  It  was  Constance's  opinion  that  he  had. 

"Do  you  know  anybody  in  the  world,"  her  husband  de 
manded,  "less  likely  to  be  interested  in  a  bargain  than  Rod 
ney  ?  Or  to  pick  a  thing  up  because  it  is  cheap  ?" 


470  THE    EEAL   ADVEXTUEE 

"Well,  then,"  Constance  said,  "you  must  think  he's  expect 
ing  Eose,  sometime  or  other,  to  come  back  to  him.  Because 
if  he  meant  to  get  a  divorce  and  marry  some  one  else,  he  cer 
tainly  wouldn't  want  to  live  in  that  house  with  her.  He'd 
want  as  few  reminders  as  possible,  not  as  many.  And  yet, 
it  was  Eose  herself,  according  to  Harriet,  who  was  so  anxious, 
toward  the  last,  to  get  rid  of  the  place.  So  there  you  are! 
It's  a  mystery  any  way  you  take  it." 

John  Williamson  said  he  understood,  though  when  Violet 
pressed  him  for  an  explanation  he  was  a  little  vague. 

"Why,"  he  said,  "it's  just  a  polite  way  of  telling  us  all  to 
go  to  the  devil.  He  knows  we're  all  talking  our  heads  off 
about  him,  and  sympathizing  with  him,  and  wondering  what 
he's  going  to  do,  and  he  buys  that  house  to  serve  notice  that 
he's  going  to  stay  put.  Business  as  usual  at  the  old  stand.  I 
shouldn't  be  surprised  if  he  meant  the  same  message  for  Eose. 
That  is  to  say,  that  the  place  will  always  be  there  for  her  to 
come  back  to." 

Outside  their  immediate  circle^  no  such  imaginative  ex 
planations  were  resorted  to.  Eose  was  coming  back  of  course. 
And  the  interesting  theme  for  speculation  was  what  would 
happen  to  her  when  she  did.  Would  she  try  to  take  her  old 
place;  ignore  the  past;  treat  that  outrageous  escapade  with 
the  Globe  chorus  as  if  it  had  never  happened?  And  if  she 
did  try  to  do  that,  could  she  succeed?  It  all  depended  on 
what  a  few  people  did.  If  they,  the  three  or  four  supremely 
right  ones,  were  to  acquiesce  in  this  treatment  of  the  situation, 
Eose  could,  more  or  less,  get  away  with  it.  Although  even 
then,  things  could  never  be  quite  the  same. 

But  the  sterility  of  these  speculations  gradually  became 
apparent  as  the  winter  months  slipped  away  and  Eose  did 
not  come  back.  It  was  felt,  though  such  a  feeling  would  have 
looked  absurd  if  put  into  words,  that  by  failing  to  come  when 
the  stage  was  set  for  her,  as  by  Eodney's  act  in  purchasing  the 
McCrea  house  it  was,  missing  her  cue  like  that,  letting  them, 
with  such  a  lot  of  solemn  thought,  discuss  and  prepare  their 
attitudes  toward  her,  all  in  vain,  she  had,  somehow,  aggra 
vated  her  original  offense  in  running  away. 


THE    TUNE    CHANGES  471 

And,  just  as  suddenly  as  they  had  begun  talking  about 
her,  they  stopped.  Rodney  and  the  twins,  living  alone  in  the 
perfect  house,  under  the  ministrations  of  a  housekeeper,  a 
head  nurse  and  an  undiminishcd  corps  of  servants,  came  to 
be  accepted  as  a  fact  that  could  be  mentioned  without  any 
string  of  commiserations  tied  to  it.  Their  world  wagged  on 
as  usual.  If,  as  John  Williamson  said,  the  hole  where  Eose 
had  been  torn  out  of  it  had  never  been  closed  up,  people  man 
aged  to  walk  around  the  edge  of  it  with  an  apparently  com 
plete  unawareness  that  it  was  there.  There  were  fresher 
themes  for  gossip : 

Hermione  Woodruff's  amazing  marriage,  for  example,  to  a 
dapper  little  futurist  painter  named  Bunting,  ten  years,  the 
uncharitable  said,  younger  than  she  was.  And  then  the  Ran 
dolphs  !  After  all  the  thrilling  events  of  their  romance,  were 
they  drifting  on  the  reefs?  There  were  straws  that  indicated 
the  wind  was  blowing  that  way. 

This  was  the  state  of  things  when  Jimmy  Wallace  threw  his 
bomb. 

There  was  always  a  warm  corner  in  Jimmy  Wallace's  bach 
elor  heart  for  youth,  and  innocence,  and  enthusiasm.  Espe 
cially  for  young  girls  who  were  innocent  and  enthusiastic. 
But  since  he  suspected  himself  of  a  tendency  to  idealize  these 
qualities,  even  to  sentimentalize  upon  them,  he  generally  kept 
a  cautious  distance  off.  Rose,  with  the  bloom  that  was  on 
her,  and  the  glow  that  radiated  from  her  the  night  he  was 
introduced  to  her  at  a  dinner  party  at  the  Williamsons',  had 
struck  him — he  was  unconscious  of  this  mental  process  no 
doubt — as  a  person  whom  it  would  be  difficult,  at  close  range, 
to  remain  quite  level-headed  about. 

Consequently,  though  his  and  Rodney's  common  friendship 
for  the  Lakes  had  drawn  him  rather  intimately  into  their 
circle,  his  attitude  toward  Rose  herself  throughout  had  re 
mained  deliberately  detached  and  impersonal.  He  was  not 
in  the  least  priggish  about  it.  He  was  quite  willing  to  let  it 
appear  that  he  liked  her  and  to  admit  that  she  liked  him.  But 
their  talk  had  always  been  not  only  objective,  but  about  ob 
jects  comparatively  remote;  chorus-girls,  for  example,  and 


473  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

Xorse  sagas,  to  take  at  random  two  of  his  wide  assortment  of 
hobbies. 

He  never  felt  himself  in  any  danger  of  idealizing  Violet 
Williamson  or  Bella  Forrester,  and  they,  along  with  their  re 
spective  husbands,  were  the  nearest  approach  to  intimates 
he  had  in  that  segment  of  society  which  gets  itself  spelled 
with  a  capital  S. 

Violet's  attitude  toward  Rose,  as  revealed  to  him  at  the 
little  dinner  following  the  Williamsons'  discovery  of  Rose  in 
the  Globe  chorus,  had  not  in  the  least  surprised  him.  For, 
with  her  husband  he  had  recognized  in  her  biting  contempt 
of  the  thing  the  girl  had  done,  the  typical  attitude  of  her 
class.  He  didn't  do  Society  very  much,  but  he  dipped  ex 
pertly  now  and  then.  He  understood  the  class-loyalty  that  is 
woven  into  all  their  traditions,  and  knew  how  violently  it  was 
outraged  by  Rose's  inexplicable  bolt. 

But,  as  I  said,  he  went  home  after  that  dinner,  rather 
mournful  over  Violet's  failure  to  see  an  aspect  of  the  thing 
which,  it  seemed  to  him,  should  have  been  apparent  to  any 
body:  this  was  Rose's  courage  in  actually  doing  the  thing. 
The  .idea  that  had  evidently  prompted  the  act  was  a  perfectly 
familiar  guest  at  their  tea-tables.  Rose  wouldn't  have  had  to 
go  to  "that  votes-for-women  mother  of  hers"  to  pick  up  the 
notion  of  the  desirability  of  economic  independence  for 
women.  But,  instead  of  playing  with  the  idea,  Rose  had 
gripped  it  in  both  hands  and  gone  through  with  it;  and  at 
what  cost  of  resolution  and  courage  Jimmy  was  perhaps  the 
only  one  of  her  friends  capable  of  forming  an  adequate  con 
ception.  But  he'd  have  thought  that  even  Violet  might  be  ex 
pected  to  see  that  a  mere  petulant  restlessness  wouldn't  have 
carried  her  through;  might  have  admitted,  if  only  in  paren 
thesis,  the  gameness  the  girl  had  shown. 

She'd  made  no  attempt  to  get  the  cards  stacked  in  her 
favor,  as  she  might  so  easily  have  done.  She  must  have 
thought  of  coming  to  him  for  advice  and  help;  must  have 
known  how  gladly  he'd  give  it.  A  note  from  him  to  Gold 
smith  would  have  spared  her  untold  terrors  and  uncertain- 


THE    TUNE    CHANGES  473 

ties.  Yet  she  had  denied  herself  that  help;  gone  ahead  and 
done  the  thing  on  her  own. 

He  could  imagine  the  sort  of  test  Galbraith  had  put  her  to 
before  giving  her  a  job  at  all.  He'd  seen  inexperienced  girls 
applying  for  positions  in  the  chorus.  He  knew  the  sort  of 
work  that  lay  behind  her  advancement  to  the  sextette.  He 
knew  that  her  presence  there  on  the  stage  of  the  Globe  the 
opening  night,  unrecognized  by  any  one  in  the  company  as 
anybody  except  Doris  Dane  of  nowhere,  represented  a  solid 
achievement  that  a  girl  Avith  Rose's  background  and  training 
might  be  proud  of. 

For  Jimmy  it  had  stamped  her,  once  and  for  all,  as  ster 
ling  metal ;  as  one  who,  however  mistaken  her  judgments,  or 
misguided  her  actions — admitting  for  the  sake  of  argument 
that  they  were  misguided — must  be  taken  seriously ;  admitted 
to  be  the  real  thing.  She'd  given  indisputable  guarantees  of 
good  faith. 

There  was  no  good,  of  course,  getting  warm  over  the  flip 
pant  cynicisms  of  her  former  friends.  There  was  no  use  even 
in  trying  to  make  them  understand  how  the  thing  looked  to 
him.  But  there  crystallized  in  him  a  wish  that  he  might  some 
day  see  Rose's  critics  fluttering  about  her  and,  as  it  were,  eat 
ing  out  of  her  hand.  He  used  to  amuse  himself  by  arranging 
all  sorts  of  extravagant  settings  for  this  picture.  He  never 
included  Rodney  in  this  vengeance,  although  he  felt  sure — • 
indeed  Rodney  had  practically  admitted  as  much  to  him — that 
it  had  been  her  husband's  disapproval,  rather  than  the  miscel 
laneous  gossip  of  society  at  large,  which  had  driven  her  from 
the  security  and  promise  of  the  Globe  to  the  exiguities  of  a 
fly-by-night  road  company.  Rodney  never  brought  up  the  sub 
ject  again  after  his  return  from  Dubuque,  though  it  soon 
became  plain  enough  without  that,  that  his  journey  had  ac 
complished  nothing. 

Jimmy  kept  track  of  the  company's  route  after  that, 
through  the  list  of  bookings  printed  in  his  theater  weekly, 
and  when  he  learned  that  the  tour  had  been  abandoned,  he 
dropped  in  one  night  at  the  Globe  on  the  off-chance  that  she 


474  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

might  have  come  back  and  got  herself  reinstated  in  the  Num 
ber  One  company,  which  was  still  doing  a  prosperous  busi 
ness. 

He  didn't  expect  to  find  her  there;  hardly  hoped  to.  A 
somewhat  better  chance  was  that  he  might  find  Alec  McEwen 
in  the  lobby,  and  that  if  little  Alec  were  properly  primed  with 
alcohol  and  led  to  a  discussion  of  the  collapse  of  the  road 
company,  he  might  volunteer  some  scrap  of  information  about 
her. 

Little  Alec  was  found  in  the  lobby,  right  enough,  and  prop 
erly  primed  in  the  bar  next  door,  and  he  described  very  vig 
orously,  the  disgust  of  Block's  brother-in-law  over  the  lemon 
the  astute  partners  had  sold  him;  for  real  money,  too.  But 
not  a  word  did  little  Alec  offer  about  Rose. 

It  was  Jimmy's  practise  to  make  two  professional  visits  to 
New  York  every  year;  one  in  the  autumn,  one  in  the  spring, 
in  order  that  he  might  have  interesting  matters  to  write  about 
when  the  local  theatrical  doings  had  been  exhausted. 

On  his  first  trip  after  Rose's  disappearance,  he  went  faith 
fully  to  every  musical  show  in  New  York,  and,  as  far  as  Rose 
was  concerned,  drew  blank.  He'd  have  taken  more  active 
measures  for  finding  her ;  would  have  made  inquiries  of  people 
he  knew,  had  it  not  been  for  a  sort  of  morbid  delicacy  about 
interfering  in  a  concern  that  not  only  was  none  of  his,  but 
that  was  supremely  the  concern  of  Rodney  Aldrich,  his  friend. 

But  from  his  spring  pilgrimage,  he  came  back  wearing  a 
deep-lying  and  contented  smile,  and  a  few  days  later,  after  a 
talk  over  the  telephone  with  Rodney,  he  headed  a  column  of 
gossip  about  the  theater,  with  the  following  paragraph : 

"Come  On  In,  as  the  latest  of  the  New  York  revues  is  called, 
is  much  like  all  the  others.  It  contains  the  same  procession 
of  specialty-mongers,  the  same  cacophony  of  rag-time,  the 
same  gangway  out  into  the  audience  which  refreshes  tired 
business  men  with  a  thrilling,  worm's-eye  view  of  dancing 
girls'  knees  au  naturel.  And  up  and  down  this  straight  and 
narrow  pathway  of  the  chorus  there  is  the  customary  parade 
of  the  same  haughty  beauties  of  Broadway.  Only  in  one  item 
is  there  a  deviation  from  the  usual  formula:  the  costumes. 


THE   TUNE    CHANGES  475 

For  several  years  past,  the  revues  at  this  theater  (the  Colum 
bian)  have  been  caparisoned  with  the  decadent  colors  and 
bizarre  designs  of  the  exotic  Mr.  Grenville  Melton.  I  knew 
there  had  been  a  change  for  the  better  as  soon  as  I  saw  the 
first  number,  for  these  dresses  have  the  stimulating  quality  of 
a  healthy  and  vigorous  imagination,  as  well  as  a  vivid  deco 
rative  value.  They  are  exceedingly  smart,  of  course,  or  else 
they  would  never  do  for  a  Broadway  revue,  but  they  are  also 
alive,  while  those  of  Mr.  Melton  were  invariably  sickly.  Curi 
ously  enough,  the  name  of  the  new  costume  designer  has  a 
special  interest  for  Chicago.  She  is  Doris  Dane,  who  partici 
pated  in  The  Girl  Up-stairs  at  the  Globe.  Miss  Dane's  stage 
experience  here  was  brief,  but  nevertheless  her  striking  suc 
cess  in  her  new  profession  will  probably  cause  the  formation 
of  a  large  and  enthusiastic  'I-knew-her-when'  club." 

Jimmy  expected  to  produce  an  effect  with  it.  But  what  he 
did  produce  exceeded  his  wildest  anticipations.  The  tiling 
came  out  in  the  three  o'clock  edition,  and  before  he  left  the 
office  that  afternoon  (he  stayed  a  little  late,  it  is  true,  and  it 
wasn't  his  "At  home"  to  press  agents  either)  he  had  received, 
over  the  telephone,  six  invitations  to  dinner;  three  of  them 
for  that  night. 

He  declined  the  first  two  on  the  ground  of  an  enormous 
press  of  work  incident  to  his  fresh  return  from  a  fortnight 
in  New  York.  But  when  Violet  called  up  and  said,  with  a 
reference  to  a  previous  engagement  that  was  shamelessly  fic 
titious  : 

"Jimmy,  you  haven't  forgotten  you're  dining  with  us  to 
night,  have  you?  It's  just  us,  so  you  needn't  dress,"  he  an 
swered  : 

"Oh,  no,  I've  got  it  down  on  my  calendar  all  right.  Seven- 
thirty?" 

Violet  snickered  and  said:  "You  wait! — Or  rather,  don't 
wait.  Make  it  seven." 

Jimmy  was  glad  to  be  let  off  that  extra  half -hour  of  wait 
ing.  He  was  impatient  for  the  encounter  with  Violet — a  state 
of  mind  most  rare  with  him.  He  meant  to  wring  all  the  pleas 
ure  out  of  it  he  could  by  way  of  compensating  himself  for 


476  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

that  other  dinner  when  Violet  had  decided  that  all  Rodney's 
most  intimate  friends  ought  really  to  be  told  what  Rose  had 
done,  in  order  that  they  might  be  scrupulous  enough  in  avoid 
ing  subjects  which  he  might  take  as  a  reference  to  his  dis 
grace. 

Violet  said,  the  moment  he  appeared  in  the  drawing-room 
doorway,  "John  made  me  swear  not  to  let  you  tell  me  a  word 
until  he  came  in.  He's  simply  burbling.  He's  out  in  the  pan 
try  now  mixing  some  extra-special  cocktails — with  his  own 
hands,  you  know — to  celebrate  the  event.  But  there's  one 
thing  he  won't  mind  your  telling  me,  and  that's  her  address. 
I'm  simply  perishing  to  write  her  a  note  and  tell  her  how 
glad  we  are." 

Jimmy  made  a  little  gesture  of  regret.  He'd  have  spoken 
too,  but  she  didn't  give  him  time. 

"You  don't  mean  to  tell  me,"  she  cried,  "that  you  didn't 
find  out  where  she  lived  while  you  were  right  there  in  New 
York !" 

John  came  in  just  then  with  the  cocktails  and  Violet,  turn 
ing  to  him  tragically,  repeated,  "He  doesn't  even  know  where 
she  lives !" 

"Oh,  I'm  a  boob,  I  know,"  said  Jimmy.  "Give  me  a  cock 
tail.  A  telephone's  the  driest  thing  in  the  world  to  talk  into. 
But,  as  I  told  the  other  five  .  .  ." 

Violet  frowned  as  she  echoed,  "The  other  five — what?" 

Jimmy  turned  to  John  Williamson  with  a  perfectly  electric 
grin. 

"The  other  five  of  Rose  Aldrich's  friends — and  yours,"  he 
said,  "who  called  me  up  this  afternoon  and  invited  me  to 
dinner,  and  asked  for  her  address  so  that  they  could  write 
her  notes  and  tell  her  how  glad  they  were." 

John  said,  "Whoosh !"  all  but  upset  his  tray  and  slammed 
it  down  on  the  piano,  in  order  to  leave  himself  free  to  jubi 
late  properly.  With  solemn  joy  he  ceremoniously  shook  hands 
with  Jimmy. 

Violet  stood  looking  at  them  thoughtfully.  A  little  flush 
of  color  was  coming  up  into  her  face. 

"You  two  men,"  she  said,  "are  trying  to  act  as  if  I  weren't 


THE   TUNE    CHANGES  477 

in  this ;  as  if  I  weren't  just  as  glad  as  you  are,  and  hadn't  as 
good  a  right  to  be.  John  here,"  this  was  to  Jimmy,  "has  been 
gloating  ever  since  he  came  home  with  the  paper.  And  you 
.  .  Did  you  mean  me  by  that  snippy  little  thing  you 
said  about  the  'I-knew-her-when'  club  ?  Oh,  it  was  fair  enough. 
I'm  glad  you  said  it.  Because  some  people  we  know  have  been 
downright  catty  about  her.  But  you  both  know  perfectly  well 
that  I've  stood  up  for  her  ever  since  last  fall  when  we  came 
through  New  York." 

John  grinned.   "When  you  saw  her,"  he  pointed  out,  "rid 
ing  down  Fifth  Avenue  in  a  taxi,  in  an  expensive  dress 
» 

"It  wasn't.  I  didn't  see  what  she  had  on.  I  just  saw  that 
she  looked  .  .  ." 

"Successful,"  John  interrupted.  But,  meeting  her  eye,  he 
apologized  hastily  and  withdrew  the  word.  His  gale  of  spirits 
had  blown  him  a  little  too  far. 

"I  saw,"  said  Violet  with  dignity,  "that  she  looked  busy 
and  cheerful,  as  if  she  knew,  in  her  own  mind,  that  she  was 
all  right.  And  I  was  glad  for  her,  and  for  us.  Because  you 
can  say  what  you  like,  you  can't  do  anything  with  the  people 
who  have  made  mistakes  and  know  it,  and  are  always  on  the 
defensive  about  them.  When  I  saw  she  didn't  feel  like  that, 
that  was  enough  for  me.  And,"  she  fairly  impaled  John  Wil 
liamson  now  with  her  eye,  "and  you  know  it." 

It  was  an  able  summary  of  her  public  attitude  since  the 
encounter  on  Fifth  Avenue,  and  her  look  at  her  husband 
relegated  any  private  observations  of  hers  at  variance  with  it 
into  the  limbo,  not  of  things  forgotten,  but  of  tilings  undone, 
unsaid,  dissolved  by  the  sheer  force  of  their  unfitness  to  exist, 
into  the  breath  that  begot  them. 

"You're  quite  right  about  it,"  said  Jimmy.  "We  men  are 
sentimentalists,  as  long  as  things  don't  come  home.  But 
when  they  do,  we're  as  uncomfortable  about  penitents  as  any 
body,  and  we  give  them  as  wide  a  berth." 

"You're  my  friend,  Jimmy,"  she  said.  "There's  dinner! 
But  you  won't  be  allowed  to  eat.  You'll  have  to  begin  at  the 
.beginning  and  tell  us  all  about  her.  Though  I  don't  see," 


478  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

she  went  on,  <chow  you  can  know  very  much  more  than  you 
put  in  the  paper,  if  you  didn't  even  find  out  where  she  lived." 

Jimmy,  his  effect  produced,  his  long  meditated  vengeance 
completed  by  the  flare  of  color  he'd  seen  come  up  in  Violet's 
cheeks,  settled  down  seriously  to  the  telling  of  his  tale,  stop 
ping  occasionally  to  bolt  a  little  food  just  before  his  plate  was 
snatched  away  from  him,  but  otherwise  without  intermission. 

He'd  suspected  nothing  about  the  costumes  on  that  opening 
night  of  Come  On  In,  until  a  realization  of  how  amazingly 
good  they  were,  made  him  search  his  program.  The  line  "Cos 
tumes  by  Dane,"  had  lighted  up  in  his  mind  a  wild  surmise 
of  the  truth,  though  he  admitted  it  had  seemed  almost  too 
good  to  be  true.  Because  the  costumes  were  really  wonderful. 
He  tried  to  tell  them  how  wonderful  they  were,  but  Violet 
seemed  to  regard  this  as  a  digression.  She  wanted  facts. 

"Anyhow,"  he  put  in  in  confirmation,  "there  wasn't  a  single 
paper  the  next  day  that  didn't  feature  the  costumes  in  speak 
ing  of  the  performance.  They  were  the  one  unqualified  hit 
of  the  show." 

He  cast  about  in  his  mind,  he  said,  for  some  way  of  finding 
out  who  Dane  really  was.  And  having  learned  that  Galbraith 
was  putting  on  the  show  at  the  Casino,  and  having  reflected 
that  he  was  as  likely  to  know  about  Rose  as  anybody,  he  looked 
him  up. 

"Galbraith,  you  know,"  he  explained,  "is  the  man  who  put 
on  The  Girl  Up-stairs  here  at  the  Globe,  winter  before  last." 

Galbraith  proved  a  mine  of  information — no,  not  a  mine, 
because  you  had  to  dig  to  get  things  out  of  a  mine.  Galbraith 
was  more  like  one  of  those  oil-wells  that  is  technically  known 
as  a  gusher.  He  simply  spouted  facts  about  Rose  and  couldn't 
be  stopped.  She  was  his  own  discovery.  He'd  seen  her  possi 
bilities  when  she  designed  and  executed  those  twelve  costumes 
for  the  sextette  in  The  Girl  Up-stairs.  He'd  brought  her 
down  to  New  York  to  act  as  his  assistant.  She  worked  for 
Galbraith  the  greater  part  of  last  season.  Jimmy  had  never 
known  of  anybody  having  just  that  sort  of  job  before.  Gal 
braith,  busy  with  two  or  three  productions  at  once,  had  put 
over  a  lot  of  tht  work  of  conducting  rehearsals  on  her  shoul- 


THE   TUNE    CHANGES  479 

ders.  He'd  get  a  number  started,  having  figured  out  the 
maneuvers  the  chorus  were  to  go  through,  the  steps  they'd 
use  and  so  on,  and  then  Eose  would  actually  take  his  place; 
would  be  in  complete  charge  of  the  rehearsal  as  the  director's 
representative,  while  he  was  off  doing  something  else. 

It  must  have  been  an  extraordinarily  interesting  job, 
Jimmy  thought,  and  evidently  she'd  got  away  witli  it,  since 
Galbraith  spoke  of  the  loss  of  her  with  unqualified  regret. 

The  costuming,  last  season,  had  been  a  side  issue,  at  the 
beginning  at  least,  but  she'd  done  part  of  the  costumes  for  one 
of  his  productions,  and  they  were  so  strikingly  successful  that 
Abe  Shunian  had  simply  snatched  her  away  from  him. 

"The  funny  thing  is  the  way  she  does  them,"  Jimmy  said. 
"Everybody  else  who  designs  costumes,  just  draws  them; 
dinky  little  water-colored  plates,  and  the  plates  are  sent  out  to 
a  company  like  The  Star  Costume  Company,  and  they  exe 
cute  them.  But  Rose  can't  draw  a  bit.  She  got  a  manikin — 
not  an  ordinary  dressmakers  form,  but  a  regular  painter's 
manikin  with  legs,  and  made  her  costumes  on  the  thing;  or 
at  least  cut  out  a  sort  of  pattern  of  them  in  cloth.  But  some 
how  or  other,  the  designing  of  them  and  the  execution  are 
more  mixed  up  together  by  Rose's  method  than  by  the  ortho 
dox  one.  She  wanted  to  get  some  women  in  to  sew  for  her, 
and  see  the  whole  job  through  herself;  deliver  the  costumes 
complete,  and  get  paid  for  them.  But  it  seems  that  the  Shu- 
mans,  on  the  side,  owned  The  Star  Company  and  raked  off 
a  big  profit  on  the  costumes  that  way.  I  don't  know  all  the 
details.  I  don't  know  that  Galbraith  did.  But,  anyhow,  the 
first  thing  anybody  knew,  Rose  had  financed  herself.  She  got 
one  of  those  rich  young  bachelor  women  in  New  York  to  go 
into  the  tiling  with  her,  and  organized  a  company,  and  made 
Abe  Shuman  an  offer  on  all  the  costumes  for  Come  On  In. 
Galbraith  thinks  that  Abe  Shuman  thought  she  was  sure  to 
lose  a  lot  of  money  on  it  and  go  broke  and  that  then  he  could 
put  her  to  work  at  a  salary,  so  he  gave  her  the  job. 

"But  she  didn't  lose.  She  evidently  made  a  chunk  out  of 
it,  and  her  reputation  at  the  same  time." 

Violet  was  immensely  thrilled  by  this  recital.    "Won't  8h« 


480  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

be  perfectly  wonderful,"  she  exclaimed,  "for  the  Junior 
League  show,  when  she  comes  back  I" 

Jimmy  found  an  enormous  satisfaction  in  saying.  "Oh, 
she'll  be  too  expensive  for  you.  She's  a  regular  robber,  she 
says." 

"She  says!"  cried  Violet.  "Do  you  mean  you've  talked  with 
her?" 

"Do  you  think  I'd  have  come  back  from  New  York  with 
out?"  said  Jimmy.  "Galbraith  told  me  to  -drop  in  at  the 
Casino  that  same  afternoon.  Some  of  the  costumes  were  to  be 
tried  on,  and  either  'Miss  Dane'  or  some  one  of  her  assistants 
would  be  there.  Probably  she  herself,  though  he  knew  she  was 
dreadfully  busy. 

"Well,  and  she  came.  I  almost  fell  over  her  out  there  in 
the  dark,  because  of  course  the  auditorium  wasn't  lighted  at 
all.  I'll  admit  she  rather  took  my  breath,  just  glancing  up  at 
me,  and  peering  to  make  out  who  I  was,  and  then  her  face 
going  all  alight  with  that  smile  of  hers.  I  didn't  know  what 
to  call  her,  and  was  stammering  over  a  mixture  of  Miss  Dane 
and  Mrs.  Aldrich,  when  she  laughed  and  held  out  a  hand  to 
me  and  said  she  didn't  remember  whether  I'd  ever  called  her 
Rose  or  not,  but  she'd  like  to  hear  some  one  call  her  that,  and 
wouldn't  I  begin." 

"And  of  course,"  said  Violet,  "you  fell  in  love  with  her  on 
the  spot." 

"No,  that  wasn't  the  spot,"  said  Jimmy.  "It  was  where  she 
stood  on  the  Globe  stage,  the  opening  night  of  The  Girl  Up 
stairs,  when  she  caught  my  eye  and  gave  a  sort  of  little  gasp, 
and  then  went  on  with  her  dance  as  if  nothing  had  happened 
that  mattered  to  her.  I  saw  then  that  she  had  more  sand  than 
I  knew  was  in  the  world." 

"And  all  your  pretending  that  night  you  were  here,  then," 
said  Violet,  "all  that  stuff  about  an  amazing  resemblance  and 
a  working  hypothesis  .  .  ." 

"All  bunk,"  said  Jimmy.  "I'd  have  gone  a  lot  further  if 
there' d  been  any  use." 

"All  right,"  said  Violet.  "I'll  forgive  you,  if  you'll  tell  me 
every  word  she  said," 


THE   TUNE    CHANGES  481 

Jimmy  explained  that  there  hadn't  been  any  chance  to  talk 
much.  The  costumes  began  coming  up  on  the  stage  just  then 
(on  chorus-girls,  of  course)  and  she  was  up  over  the  runway 
in  a  minute,  talking  them  over  with  Galbraith.  "When  she'd 
finished,  she  came  down  to  me  again  for  a  minute,  but  it  was 
hardly  longer  than  that  really.  She  said  she  wished  she 
might  see  me  again,  but  that  she  couldn't  ask  me  to  come  to 
the  studio,  because  it  was  a  perfect  bedlam,  and  that  there 
was  no  use  asking  me  to  come  to  her  apartment,  because  she 
was  never  there  herself  these  days,  except  for  about  seven 
hours  a  night  of  the  hardest  kind  of  sleep.  If  I  could  stay 
around  till  her  rush  was  over  .  .  .  But  then,  of  course, 
she  knew  I  couldn't." 

"And  you  never  thought  of  asking  her/'  Violet  wailed, 
"where  the  apartment  was,  so  that  the  rest  of  us,  if  we  were 
in  New  York,  could  look  her  up,  or  write  to  her  from  here  ?" 

"No,"  said  Jimmy.  "I  never  thought  of  asking  for  her  ad 
dress.  But  it's  the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to  get  it.  Call 
up  Rodney.  He  knows.  That's  what  I  told  the  other  five." 

"What  makes  you  think  he  knows?"  Violet  demanded.  "We 
thought  he  knew  about  that  other  thing,  but  I  don't  believe 
he  did." 

"Well,  for  one  thing,"  said  Jimmy,  "when  Rose  was  asking 
for  news  of  all  of  you,  she  said  'I  hear  from  Rodney  regularly. 
Only  he  doesn't  tell  me  much  gossip/* 

"Hears  from  him !"  gasped  Violet.  "Regularly !"  She  was 
staring  at  Jimmy  in  a  dazed  sort  of  way.  "Well,  does  she 
write  to  him  ?  Has  she  made  it  up  with  him  ?  Is  she  coming 
back?" 

"I  suppose  you  can  just  hear  me  asking  her  all  those  ques 
tions  ?  Casually,  in  the  aisle  of  a  theater,  while  she  was  get 
ting  ready  for  a  running  jump  into  a  taxi  ?" 

The  color  came  up  into  Violet's  face  again.  There  was  a 
maddening  fort  of  jiibilant  jocularity  about  these  men,  the 
looks  aim  almost  winks  they  exchanged,  the  distinctly  saucy 
quality  of  the  things  they  said  to  her. 

"Of  course,"  she  said  coolly,  "if  Rose  had  told  me  that  she 
heard  from  Rodney  regularly,  although  he1  didn't  send  her 


482  THE   REAL   ADVENTUBE 

much  of  the  gossip,  I  shouldn't  have  had  to  ask  her  those  ques 
tions.  I'd  have  known  from  the  way  she  looked  and  the  way 
her  voice  sounded,  whether  she  was  writing  to  Eodney  or  not 
and  whether  she  meant  to  come  back  to  him  or  not ;  whether 
she  was  ready  to  make  it  up  if  he  was — all  that.  Any  woman 
who  knew  her  at  all  would.  Only  a  man,  perfectly  infatuated, 
grinning  .  .  .  See  if  you  can't  tell  what  she  looked  like 
and  how  she  said  it." 

Jimmy,  meek  again,  attempted  the  task. 

"Well,"  he  said,  "she  didn't  look  me  in  the  eye  and  register 
deep  meanings  or  anything  like  that.  I  don't  know  where 
she  looked.  As  far  as  the  inflection  of  her  voice  went,  it  was 
just  as  casual  as  if  she'd  been  telling  me  what  she'd  had  for 
lunch.  But  the  quality  of  her  voice  just — richened  up  a  bit, 
as  if  the  words  tasted  good  to  her.  And  she  smiled  just  barely 
as  if  she  knew  I'd  be  staggered  and  didn't  care  a  damn.  There 
you  are !  Now  interpret  unto  me  this  dream,  oh,  Joseph." 

Violet's  eyes  were  shining.  "Why,  it's  as  plain!"  she  said. 
"Can't  you,  see  that  she's  just  waiting  for  him;  that  she'll 
come  like  a  shot  the  minute  he  says  the  Avord  ?  And  there  he 
is,  eating  his  heart  out  for  her,  and  in  his  rage  charging  poor 
John  perfectly  terrific  prices  for  his  legal  services,  when  all 
he's  got  to  do  is  to  say  'please/  in  order  to  be  happy." 

There  was  a  little  silence  after  that.    Then: 

"Don't  you  suppose,"  she  went  on,  "there's  something  we 
can  do  ?" 

A  supreme  contentment  always  made  John  Williamson  si 
lent.  He'd  been  beaming  at  Jimmy  all  through  the  dinner, 
guarding  him  tenderly  against  interruptions,  with  panto 
mimic  instructions  to  the  servants.  If  the  vague  look  in 
Jimmy's  eyes  suggested  the  want  of  a  cigarette,  John  nodded 
one  up  for  him.  He  didn't  ask  a  question.  Evidently,  between 
Jimmy  and  Violet,  the  story  was  being  elicited  to  his  satisfac 
tion.  But  it  was  amazing  how  quickly  that  last  word  of  his 
wife's  snatched  him  out  of  that  beatific  abstraction. 

"No,  there  is  not,"  he  said. 

The  tone  of  his  voice  was  a  good  deal  more  familiar  to  his 
fellow  directors  in  some  of  his  enterprises,  than  it  was  to  his 


THE    TUXE    CHANGES  483 

wife.  She  looked  at  him  as  if  she  couldn't  quite  believe  she'd 
understood. 

"There  is  not  what?"  she  asked. 

"There  is  not  a  thing  that  we  can  do  or  are  going  to  do 
about  Rose  and  Rodney.  We  did  something  once  before  and 
made  a  mess  of  it.  This  time  we're  going  to  let  them  alone. 
They're  both  of  age  and  of  sound  mind,  and  they've  got  each 
other's  addresses.  If  they  want  to  get  together  again,  they 
will." 

"I've  had  a  perfectly  bang-up  evening,"  said  Jimmy  to  Vio 
let  a  little  later  when  he  took  his  leave. 

"I  know  you  have,"  she  said  dryly.  Then,  with  a  change 
of  manner,  "But  I  have,  too,  Jimmy.  You  believe  that,  don't 
you  ?" 

"Sure  I  do,"  he  said,  and  shook  hands  with  her  all  over 
again.  Violet  was  a  good  sort. 

Riding  home  in  the  elevated  train,  Jimmy  Wallace  hummed 
what  he  conceived  to  be  a  tune.  And  when  he  did  that  . ! 


CHAPTER  II 

A  BEOKEN   PARALLEL 

of  the  speculative  explanations  Rodney's  friends  ad 
vanced  for  his  having  bought  that  precious  solemn  house  of 
the  McCreas,  together  with  all  its  rarified  esthetic  furniture, 
exactly  covered  the  ground.  He  didn't  buy  it  in  the  expecta 
tion  that  Rose  was  coming  back  to  live  in  it,  and  still  less 
with  the  even  remote  notion  of  finding  a  successor  to  her.  He 
hadn't  bought  it  because  it  was  a  bargain.  He  had  very  little 
idea  whether  it  was  a  bargain  or  not.  And  if  there  was  a 
grain  of  truth  in  John  Williamson's  explanation,  Rodney  was 
only  vaguely  aware  of  it. 

He'd  have  said,  if  he'd  set  about  formulating  an  explana 
tion,  that  he  bought  the  house  as  a  result  of  eliminating  the 
alternatives  to  buying  it.  Florence  meant  to  sell  it  to  some 
body,  and  if  he  didn't  buy  it,  he'd  have  to  move  out.  Rather 
disingenuously,  he  represented  to  himself  that  his  dislike  of 
moving  out  sprang  from  the  trouble  that  would  be  involved 
in  finding  some  other  place  to  live  in,  furnishing  it,  reorgan 
izing  his  establishment.  Really,  he  hadn't  time  for  that.  Fred- 
erica  would  have  done  it  for  him  in  a  minute,  but  he  ignored 
that  possibility. 

Down  underneath  these  shallow  practical  considerations, 
lay  the  fact  that  such  a  reorganization  would  have  been  a  tacit 
acknowledgment  of  defeat;  not  only  an  acknowledgment  to 
the  world,  which  he'd  have  liked  to  pretend  didn't  matter 
much,  but  an  acknowledgment  of  defeat  to  himself.  What 
he  had  been  trying  to  do  ever  since  his  return  from  that  mad 
dening  talk  with  Rose  in  Dubuque,  had  been  just  to  sit  tight ; 
to  go  on  living  a  day  at  a  time ;  to  take  the  future  in  as  small 
doses  as  he  could  manage. 

Had  he  been  the  sort  of  person  who  finds  comfort  in  mot- 

484 


A    BROKEX    PARALLEL  485 

toes,  he'd  have  laid  in  a  stock,  such  as,  "Sufficient  unto  the 
day  is  the  evil  thereof";  "Holdfast  is  the  only  dog";  "Don't 
cross  your  bridges  until  you  come  to  them/'  As  the  period 
between  the  night  of  his  discovery  of  Rose  on  the  Globe  stage 
and  the  day  of  his  return  from  Dubuque  receded,  and  as  the 
fierceness  of  the  pain  of  it  died  away  again  (because  such 
pains  do  die  away.  They  can't  keep  screwed  up  into  an  ecstasy 
of  torment  forever)  the  part  he'd  played  in  the  events  of  it, 
seemed  to  him  less  and  less  worthy  of  the  sort  of  man  he'd 
always  considered  himself  to  be;  a  self-controlled,  self-dis 
ciplined  adult.  He'd  acted  for  a  while  there,  with  the  savage 
egotism  of  a  distracted  boy ;  thrown  his  dignity  to  the  winds ; 
made  a  holy  show  of  himself.  Well,  that  period  was  over  at 
all  events.  Whatever  the  future  might  confront  him  with, 
he  could  promise  himself,  he  thought,  to  keep  his  head. 

But  for  a  while,  he  didn't  want  to  be  confronted  with  any 
thing,  let  alone  to  start  anything;  not  until  he  could  get  his 
breath;  not  until  he  had  time  to  think  everything  out;  dis 
cover,  if  possible,  where  the  whole  miserable  trouble  had  be 
gun.  He'd  go  back  to  the  beginning,  sometime,  and  try  to 
work  it  all  out.  It  went,  probably,  a  long  way  back  of  the 
night  when  that  hasty  speech  of  his  about  not  jeopardizing 
the  children's  lives  to  gratify  his  wife's  whims  had  set  the 
match  to  her  resolution  to  leave  him  and  the  babies  and  live 
a  life  for  herself. 

But,  though  he  told  himself  every  day  that  he  must  begin 
ordering  his  old  memories,  analyzing  them,  in  search  of  the 
clue,  he  didn't  begin  the  process.  Spiritually,  he  just  held 
himself  rigidly  still.  He  might  have  compared  himself  to  a 
man  standing  off  a  pack  of  wolves,  knowing  that  his  slightest 
move  would  precipitate  a  rush  upon  him.  Or,  perhaps  more 
nearly,  to  a  man  just  recovering  consciousness  after  an  acci 
dent,  afraid  to  stir  lest  the  smallest  movement  might  reveal 
more  serious  injuries  than  he  suspected. 

His  mind  had  never  worked  so  brilliantly  as  it  was  working 
now.  The  problems  involved  in  his  clients'  affairs  were  child's 
play  to  him.  He  took  them  apart  and  put  them  together 
again  with  a  careless,  confident,  infallible  perspicacity  that 


486  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

amazed  his  colleagues  and  his  opponents.  And,  as  Frank 
Crawford  had  pointed  out,  he  took  a  savagely  contemptuous 
pleasure  in  making  those  clients  pay  through  the  nose. 

But  he  could  look  neither  back  at  Eose,  nor  forward  to  her. 
He  could  not,  by  any  stretch  of  resolution,  have  nerved  him 
self  to  the  point  of  giving  up  that  house  that  had  nearly 
all  his  memories  of  her  associated  with  it.  There  hadn't  been 
a  change  of  a  single  piece  of  furniture  in  it  since  she  went 
away.  Her  bedroom  and  her  dressing-room  were  just  as  she 
had  left  them.  Her  clothes  were  just  as  they  had  been  left 
after  the  packing  of  that  small  trunk.  She  might  have  been 
off  spending  a  week-end  somewhere. 

The  attitude  couldn't  be  kept  up  forever,  he  knew.  Some 
time  or  other  he'd  have  to  cross  the  next  bridge ;  come  to  some 
more  definite  understanding  with  Rose  than  that  inconclusive 
ridiculous  scene  there  in  Dubuque  had  left  him  with.  ( What  a 
fool  he  had  been  that  day!)  There  were  the  twins  coming 
along.  For  the  present,  their  nurse  (It  wasn't  Mrs.  Ruston. 
He'd  taken  the  first  reasonable  excuse  for  supplanting  her.) 
and  the  pretty  little  snub-nosed  nurse-maid  Rose  had  liked, 
could  supply  their  wants  well  enough.  But  the  time  wasn't 
so  far  ahead  when  they'd  need  a  mother.  What  would  he  do 
then;  let  Rose  have  them  half  the  time  and  keep  them  half 
the  time  himself?  He'd  read  a  perfectly  beastly  book  once, 
—he  couldn't  remember  the  title  of  it — about  a  child  who  had 
been  brought  up  that  way.  But,  at  all  events,  he  needn't  do 
anything  yet. 

Meanwhile,  it  healed  his  lacerated  pride  to  march  along 
and  keep  the  routine  going.  It  was  with  a  perfectly  immense 
relief  that  he  snatched  at  the  chance  to  buy  the  McCrea  house, 
and  by  so  doing  make  the  permanency  of  his  way  of  life  a 
little  more  secure.  He  could  keep  what  he  had,  anyway.  And 
he  could  show  the  world,  and  Rose,  that  he  wasn't  the  broken 
frantic  creature  he  knew  she'd  seen,  and  suspected  it  had 
glimpsed.  John  Williamson's  explanation  wasn't  altogether 
wrong. 

Perhaps,  had  it  been  possible  for  Jimmy  Wallace  to  tell 
him,  just  as  he  told  Violet  and  John  Williamson,  hoAV  Rose's 


A    BROKEN    PARALLEL  487 

voice  "richened  up  as  if  the  words  tasted  good  to  Her,"  when 
she  mentioned  the  fact  that  she  heard  from  her  husband  "reg 
ularly  but  not  much,"  he  might  have  drawn  the  same  favor 
able  augury  from  it  that  Violet  did.  But  from  her  answering 
communications,  though  he  drew  comfort,  he  got  no  hope. 

It  was  Hose  herself  who  began  this  correspondence,  within 
a  month  of  her  arrival  in  New  York.  And  Rodney,  when 
he  finished  reading  her  letter,  tore  it  to  pieces  and  flung 
it  into  the  fire,  in  a  transport  of  disappointment  and  anger. 
The  sight  of  her  writing  on  the  envelope  had  brought  his 
heart  into  his  mouth,  of  course.  And  when  his  shaking  fin 
gers  had  got  it  open  and  he  saw  that  it  indeed  contained  a 
letter  from  her,  beginning  "Dear  Rodney,"  and  signed  "Rose," 
the  wild  surge  of  hope  that  swept  over  him  actually  turned 
him  giddy,  so  that  it  was  two  or  three  minutes  before  he 
could  read  it. 

But  the  thing  ran  like  another  instalment  of  the  talk  they 
had  had  in  Dubuque.  She  knew  he  had  been  distressed  over 
the  shabbiness  of  her  surroundings,  knocking  about  with  that 
road  company,  and  she  was  afraid  that  in  spite  of  the  assur 
ance  she  had  then  given  him,  he  was  still  worried  about  her. 
She  was  sure  he'd  be  glad  to  know  that  she'd  quit  the  stage 
for  good,  as  an  active  performer  on  it,  at  least;  that  she  was 
earning  an  excellent  salary,  fifty  dollars  a  week,  doing  a 
highly  congenial  kind  of  work  that  had  good  prospects  of  ad 
vancement  in  it.  She  had  a  very  comfortable  little  apartment 
(she  gave  him  the  address  of  it)  and  was  living  in  a  way  that 
— she  had  written  "even  Harriet,"  but  scratched  this  out — 
Frederica,  for  example,  would  consider  entirely  respectable. 
So  he  needn't  feel  another  moment's  anxiety  about  her.  She'd 
have  written  sooner,  but  had  wanted  to  get  fully  settled  in 
her  new  job  and  be  sure  she  was  going  to  be  able  to  keep  it, 
in  order  that  she  might  have  something  definitely  reassuring 
to  tell  him.  And  she  hoped  he  and  the  babies  were  well. 

It  was  not  until  hours  afterward,  when  the  letter  was  an  in 
distinguishable  fluff  of  white  ash  in  the  fireplace,  that  it  oc 
curred  to  him  that  it  had  no  satirical  intent  whatever  and 
that  the  purpose  of  it  had  been,  quite  simply,  what  it  had 


488  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

pretended  to  be;  namely,  to  reassure  him  and  put  an  end  to 
his  anxieties. 

As  he  had  read  it  in  the  revulsion  from  that  literally  sick 
ening  hope  of  his,  it  had  seemed  about  the  most  mordant  piece 
of  irony  that  had  ever  been  launched  against  him.  The  as 
sumption  of  it  had  seemed  to  be  that  he  was  the  most  pitiable 
snob  in  the  world;  that  all  he'd  cared  for  had  been  that  she'd 
disgraced  him  by  going  on  the  stage.  He'd  be  glad  to  know 
that  she  was  once  more  "respectable." 

Well — this  was  the  question  which,  as  I  said,  he  did  not  ask 
himself  until  hours  later — wasn't  she  justified  in  believing 
that  ?  Certainly  that  night,  in  her  little  room  on  North  Clark 
Street,  he'd  given  her  reason  enough  for  thinking  so.  But 
later,  in  Dubuque — well,  hadn't  he  quoted  Harriet  to  her? 
Hadn't  he  offered  to  help  her  as  a  favor  to  himself,  because  he 
couldn't  endure  it  that  she  should  live  like  this  ?  Had  he  ex 
hibited  anything  to  her  at  all  in  their  two  encounters,  but  an 
uncontrolled  animal  lust  and  a  perfectly  contemptible  vanity  ? 

He  bitterly  regretted  having  destroyed  the  letter.   But  the 
tone  of  it,  he  was  sure,  except  for  that  well  merited  jibe  about 
Harriet,  which  had  been  erased,  was  kindly.  Yet  he  had  acted 
once  mere,  like  a  spoiled  child  about  it. 

Could  he  write  and  thank  her  ?  In  Dubuque  she  had  asked 
him  not  to  come  back.  Did  that  prohibition  cover  writing? 
Her  letter  did  not  explicitly  revoke  it.  She  asked  him  no  ques 
tions.  But  he  remembered  now  a  post-script,  which,  at  the 
time  of  reading,  he'd  taken  merely  as  a  final  barb  of  satire. 
"I  am  still  Doris  Dane  down  here,  of  course,"  it  had  read.  If 
she  hadn't  meant  that  for  a  sneering  assurance  that  his  pre 
cious  name  wasn't  being  taken  in  vain — and  had  he  ever  heard 
Rose  sneer  at  anybody? — what  could  have  been  the  purpose  of 
it  except  to  make  sure  that  a  letter  from  him  wouldn't  come 
addressed  "Rose  Aldrich,"  and  so  fail  to  be  delivered  to  her. 

It  was  due  only  to  luck  that,  in  his  first  disappointment,  he 
hadn't  destroyed  her  address  with  the  letter.  But  she  had  du 
plicated  it  on  the  flap  of  the  envelope,  and  the  envelope  was 
not  thrown  in  the  fire. 

He  spent  hours  composing  a  reply.  And  the  thing  he  finally 


A    BEOKEN    PARALLEL  489 

sent  off,  once  it  was  committed  to  the  post,  seemed  quite  the 
worst  of  all  his  efforts.  His  impulse  was  to  send  another  on 
the  heels  of  it.  But  he  waited  a  week,  then  wrote  again.  And 
this  time,  the  stiffness  of  self-consciousness  was  not  quite  so 
paralyzing.  He  managed  to  give  her  a  little  real  information 
about  the  condition  of  the  twins  and  the  household.  About 
himself,  he  stated  that  he  was  well,  though  busier  than  he 
liked  to  be. 

He  experienced  a  very  vague,  faint  satisfaction,  two  days 
later,  over  the  reflection  that  this  letter  was  in  her  hands,  and 
he  came  presently  to  the  audacious  resolution  that  until  she 
forbade  him,  he  would  go  on  writing  to  her  every  week.  She'd 
see  that  she  needn't  answer  and  it  would  no  doubt  add  some 
thing — how  much  he  didn't  dare  to  try  to  estimate — to  her 
happiness,  to  know  that  all  was  going  well  in  the  home  that 
she  had  left. 

She  began  pretty  soon  to  answer  these  letters  with  stiff  little 
notes,  strictly  limited  to  a  bulletin  of  her  own  activities  and 
a  grateful  acknowledgment  of  the  latest  one  he  had  sent  her. 
Invariably,  every  Tuesday  morning,  one  of  these  notes  ar 
rived.  And  this  state  of  things  continued,  unchanged,  for 
months. 

He  experienced  a  bewildering  mixture  of  emotions  over 
these  letters  of  hers.  They  drove  him,  sometimes,  into  out 
bursts  of  petulant  rage.  Often  the  knowledge  that  one  of 
them  was  to  be  expected  in  the  morning,  delivered  him  up, 
against  all  the  resistance  he  could  make,  to  a  flood  of  tor 
menting  memories  of  her.  And  across  the  mood  the  letter 
would  find  him  in,  its  cool  little  commonplaces  would  sting 
like  the  cut  of  a  whip. 

The  mere  facts  her  letters  recounted  aroused  contradictory 
emotions  in  him,  too.  They  all  spelled  success  and  assurance, 
and  almost  from  week  to  week  they  marked  advancement.  The 
first  effect  of  this  was  always  to  make  his  heart  sink ;  to  make 
her  seem  farther  away  from  him ;  to  make  the  possibility  of 
any  future  need  of  him  that  would  give  him  his  opportunity, 
seem  more  and  more  remote.  The  other  feeling,  whose  glow 
he  was  never  conscious  of  till  later — a  feeling  so  surprising 


490  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

and  irrational  that  he  could  hardly  call  it  by  name,  was  pride. 
What  in  God's  name  had  he  to  be  proud  of?  Was  she  a  pos 
session  of  his?  Could  he  claim  any  credit  for  her  success? 
But  the  glow  persisted  in  spite  of  these  questions. 

His  satisfaction  in  his  own  letters  to  her  was  less  mixed. 
They  must,  he  thought,  gradually  be  restoring  in  her  mind, 
the  image  of  himself  as  a  man  who,  as  Harriet  said,  could 
take  his  medicine  without  making  faces;  who  could  endure 
pain  and  punishment  without  howling  about  it.  Perhaps,  in 
time,  those  letters  would  obliterate  the  memory  of  the  vain 
beast  he'd  been  that  night  .  .  . 

If  Eodney  had  done  an  unthinkable  thing;  if  he  had  kept 
copies  of  his  letters  to  Rose,  along  with  her  answers,  in  a 
chronological  file  the  way  Miss  Beach  kept  his  business  cor 
respondence,  he  would  have  made  the  discovery  that  the  stiff 
ness  of  them  had  gradually  worn  away  and  that  they  were 
now  a  good  deal  more  than  mere  pro  forma  bulletins.  There 
had  crept  into  them,  so  subtly  and  so  gently  that  between  one 
of  them  and  the  next  no  striking  difference  was  to  be  observed, 
a  friendliness,  quite  cool,  but  wonderfully  firm.  She  was 
frankly  jubilant  over  the  success  of  her  costumes  in  Come  On 
In  and  she  enclosed  with  her  letter  a  complete  set  of  newspa 
per  reviews  of  the  piece.  They  reached  him  a  day  or  two  be 
fore  Jimmy  Wallace  telephoned,  and  this  fact  perhaps  had 
something  to  do  with  the  gruff  good  humor  with  which  he 
told  Jimmy  to  go  as  far  as  he  liked  in  his  newspaper  para 
graph. 

It  was  a  week  later  that  she  wrote : 

"I  met  James  Randolph  coming  up  Broadway  yesterday 
afternoon,  about  five  o'clock.  I  had  a  spare  half-hour  and  he 
said  he  had  nothing  else  but  spare  half -hours;  that  was  what 
he'd  come  to  New  York  for.  So  we  turned  into  the  Knicker 
bocker  and  had  tea.  He's  changed,  somehow,  since  I  saw  him 
last;  as  brilliant  as  ever,  but  rather — lurid.  Do  you  suppose 
things  are  going  badly  between  him  and  Eleanor?  I'd  hate 
to  think  that,  but  I  shouldn't  be  surprised.  He  spoke  of  call 
ing  me  up  again,  but  this  morning,  instead,  I  got  a  note  from 


A    BEOKEX    PAEALLEL  491 

him  saying  he  was  going  back  to  Chicago.     lie  told  me  he 
hadn't  seen  you  forever.    Why  don't  you  drop  in  on  him  ?" 

It  was  quite  true  that  Eodney  had  seen  very  little  of  the 
Randolphs  since  Eose  went  away.  His  liking  for  James  had 
always  been  an  affair  of  the  intelligence.  The  doctor's  mind, 
with  its  powers  of  dissecting  and  coordinating  the  phenomena 
of  every-day  life,  its  luminous  flashes,  its  readiness  to  go  all 
the  way  through  to  the  most  startling  conclusions,  had  always 
so  stimulated  and  attracted  his  own,  that  he'd  never  stopped 
to  ask  whether  or  not  he  liked  the  rest  of  the  man  that  lay 
below  the  intelligence. 

When  it  came  to  confronting  his  friends,  in  the  knowledge 
that  they  knew  that  Eose  had  left  him  for  the  Globe  chorus, 
he  found  that  James  Eandolph  was  one  he  didn't  care  to  face, 
lie  knew  too  damned  much.  He'd  be  too  infernally  curious ; 
too  full  of  surmises,  eager  for  experiments. 

The  Eodney  of  a  year  before,  intact,  unscarred,  without, 
he'd  have  said,  a  joint  in  his  harness,  could  afford  to  enjoy 
with  no  more  than  a  deprecatory  grin,  the  doctor's  outrageous 
and  remorseless  way  of  pinning  out  on  his  mental  dissecting 
board,  anything  that  came  his  way.  The  Eodney  who  came 
back  from  Dubuque  couldn't  grin.  He  knew  too  much  of  the 
intimate  agony  that  produced  those  interesting  lesions  and 
abnormalities.  Even  in  the  security,  if  it  could  have  been  had, 
that  his  own  situation  wouldn't  be  scientifically  dissected  and 
discussed,  he'd  still  have  wanted  to  keep  away  from  James 
Eandolph. 

But  Eose's  letter  put  a  different  face  on  the  matter.  He  felt 
perfectly  sure  that  Eandolph  hadn't  been  analyzing  her  dur 
ing  that  spare  half-hour  at  the  Knickerbocker.  The  shoe,  it 
appeared,  had  been  on  the  other  foot.  The  fact  that  she'd  put 
him,  partly  at  least,  in  possession  of  what  she  had  observed 
and  what  she  guessed,  gave  him  a  sort  of  shield  against  the 
doctor.  He  told  himself  that  his  principal  reason  for  going 
was  to  get  a  little  bit  more  information  about  Eose  than  her 
letters  provided  him  with.  But  the  anticipation  he  dwelt  on 


492  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

with  the  greatest  pleasure,  really,  was  of  saying,  "Oh,  yes. 
Rose  wrote  that  she'd  seen  you." 

So  one  evening,  after  keeping  up  the  pretense  through  his 
solitary  dinner  and  the  cigar  that  followed  it,  that  he  meant 
presently  to  go  up  to  his  study  and  correct  galley  proofs  on 
an  enormous  brief,  he  slipped  out  about  nine  o'clock,  and 
walked  around  to  the  Randolphs'  new  house. 

This  latest  venture  of  Eleanor's  had  attracted  a  good  deal 
of  comment  among  her  friends.  Somebody  called  it,  with  a 
rather  cruel  double  entendre,  Bertie  Willis'  last  word.  In  the 
obvious  sense  of  the  phrase,  this  was  true.  Eleanor  had  given 
him  a  free  hand,  and  he  had  gone  his  limit.  He'd  been  work 
ing  slowly  backward  from  Jacobean,  through  Tudor.  But  this 
thing  was  perfect  Perpendicular.  You  could,  as  John  Wil 
liamson  said,  kid  yourself  into  the  notion,  when  you  walked 
under  the  keel-shaped  arch  to  their  main  doorway,  that  you 
were  going  to  church.  And  the  style  was  carried  out  with 
inexorable  rigor,  down  to  the  most  minute  details.  But  since 
everybody  knew  that  the  latest  thing,  the  inevitably  coming 
thing,  was  the  pure  unadulterated  ugliness  of  Georgian,  a 
style  that  Bertie  had  opposed  venomously  (because  he  couldn't 
build  it,  the  uncharitable  said) ;  and  because  even  Bertie's 
carefully  preserved  youth  was  felt  to  have  gone  a  little  stale 
and  it  was  no  longer  fashionable  to  consider  his  charms  irre 
sistible,  the  phrase,  "his  last  word,"  was  instantly  understood, 
as  I  said,  to  have  a  secondary  sense. 

No  one,  of  course,  could  tell  Eleanor  anything  about  what 
the  coming  styles  were  going  to  be,  in  architecture  or  any 
thing  else.  She  was  one  of  these  persons  with  simply  a  sixth 
sense  for  fashions,  and  her  having  gone  to  Bertie  Willis, 
instead  of  to  young  Mellish  of  the  historic  New  York  firm, 
McCleod,  Hill,  Stone  &  Black,  who  was  doing  such  delight 
fully  hideous  things  in  Georgian,  caused,  among  her  friends, 
a  good  deal  of  comment.  Pier  explanation  that  medicine  was 
a  medieval  profession  and  that  she  had  to  have  a  medieval 
house  to  go  with  James,  was  felt  to  be  a  mere  evasion. 

It  was  recognized  that  one  had  to  flirt  with  Bertie  while  he 
was  building  her  house.  And  in  the  days  when  everybody  else 


A   BROKEN   PARALLEL  493 

had  been  doing  it,  too,  it  didn't  matter.  But  now  that  the  cele 
brated  hareem  had  ceased  to  exist,  it  was  felt  that  one  would 
do  well  to  be  a  little  careful;  at  least,  to  put  a  more  or  less 
summary  end  to  the  flirtation  when  the  house  was  finished. 
But  Eleanor  hadn't  done  that.  She  was  playing  with  him 
more  exclusively  than  ever. 

Rodney  hadn't  been  in  the  house  before,  and  he  reflected, 
as  he  stood  at  the  door,  after  ringing  the  bell,  that  his  own 
house  was  quite  meek  and  conventional  alongside  this.  The 
grin  that  this  consideration  afforded  him,  was  still  on  his  lips 
when,  a  servant  having  opened  the  door,  he  found  himself 
face  to  face  with  the  architect. 

Bertie,  top-coated  and  hat  in  hand,  was  waiting  for  Eleanor, 
who  was  coming  down  the  stairs  followed  by  a  maid  with  her 
carriage  coat.  He  returned  Rodney's  nod  pretty  stiffly,  as  was 
natural  enough,  since  Rodney's  grin  had  distinctly  brightened 
up  at  sight  of  him. 

Eleanor  said,  rather  negligently,  "Hello,  Rod.  We're  just 
clashing  off  to  the  Palace  to  see  a  perfectly  exquisite  little 
dancer  Bertie's  discovered  down  there.  She  comes  on  at  half 
past  nine,  so  we've  got  to  fly.  Want  to  come  ?" 

"No,"  Rodney  said.  "I  came  over  to  see  Jim.  Is  he  at 
home?" 

The  maid  was  holding  out  the  coat  for  Eleanor's  arms,  Ber 
tie  was  fussing  around  ineffectually,  hooking  his  stick  over 
his  left  arm  to  give  him  a  free  right  hand  to  do  something 
with,  he  didn't  quite  know  what.  But  Eleanor,  at  Rodney's 
question,  just  stood  for  a  second  quite  still.  She  wasn't  look 
ing  at  anybody,  but  the  expression  in  her  eyes  was  sullen. 

"Yes,  he's  at  home,"  she  said  at  last. 

"Busy,  I  suppose,"  said  Rodney.  Her  inflection  had  dic 
tated  this  reply. 

"Yes,  he's  busy,"  she  repeated  absently  and  in  a  tone  still 
more  coldly  hostile,  though  Rodney  perceived  that  the  hostility 
was  not  meant  for  him.  And  so  plainly  did  the  tone  and  the 
look  and  the  arrested  attitude  proclaim  that  she  was  following 
out  a  train  of  thought  and  hadn't  as  yet  got  to  the  end  of  it, 
that  he  stood  as  still  as  she  was. 


494  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

Bertie,  irreproachably  correct  as  always,  settled  his  shoul 
ders  inside  his  coat,  and  took  his  stick  in  his  right  hand  again. 
Eleanor  now  looked  around  at  him. 

"Wait  two  minutes,"  she  said,  "if  you  don't  mind."  Then, 
to  Rodney,  "Come  along."  And  she  led  the  way  up  the  lus 
trous,  velvety  teakwood  stair. 

He  followed  her.  But  arrived  at  the  drawing-room  floor, 
he  protested. 

"Look  here!"  he  said.    "If  Jim's  busy    .     .    ." 

"You've  never  been  in  here  before,  have  you?"  she  asked. 
"How's  Rose?  Jim  saw  her,  you  know,  in  New  York." 

"Yes,"  he  said.  "Rose  wrote  to  me  she'd  seen  him,  and  I 
thought  I'd  drop  around  for  a  chat.  But  if  he's  busy  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  don't  be  too  dense,  Rodney !"  she  said.  "A  man  has  to 
be  busy  when  he's  known  to  be  in  the  house  and  won't  enter 
tain  his  wife's  guests.  Go  up  one  flight  more  and  to  the  door 
that  corresponds  to  that  one.  It  won't  do  you  any  good  to 
knock.  He'll  either  not  answer  or  else  tell  you  to  go  to  hell. 
Just  sing  out  who  you  are  and  go  right  in." 

She  gave  him  a  nod  and  a  hard  little  smile,  and  went  down 
stairs  again  to  Bertie. 

Rodney  stood  where  she  had  left  him,  in  two  minds  whether 
to  carry  out  her  instructions  or  to  wait  until  he  heard  her  and 
Bertie  go  out  and  then  quietly  follow  them.  It  was  a  beastly 
situation,  dragged  into  a  family  quarrel  like  that;  forced 
to  commit  an  intrusion  that  was  so  plainly  labeled  in  advance. 
And  on  the  other  hand,  it  was  a  decidedly  interesting  situa 
tion.  If  Eleanor  was  as  reckless  as  that  with  facts  most 
women  keep  to  themselves  as  long  as  possible,  what  would 
her  outspoken  husband  be.  But  if  he  were  full  of  his  griev 
ances,  he  probably  wouldn't  talk  about  Rose. 

What  really  determined  his  action  was  Eleanor's  discovery, 
or  pretended  discovery  down  in  the  hall  below,  that  her  gloves 
weren't  what  she  wanted  and  her  instructions  to  the  maid  to 
go  up  and  get  her  a  fresh  pair.  It  would  be  too  ridiculous 
to  be  caught  there — lurking. 

So  he  mounted  the  next  flight,  found  the  door  Eleanor  had 
indicated,  knocked  smartly  on  it,  and  to  forestall  his  getting 


A    BROKEN    PARALLEL  495 

told  to  go  to  hell,  sang  out  at  the  same  time,  "This  is  Rodney 
Aldrich.  May  I  come  in?" 

"Come  in,  of  course,"  Randolph  called.  "I'm  glad  to  see 
you,"  he  added,  coming  to  meet  his  guest.  "But  do  you  mind 
telling  me  how  the  devil  you  got  in  here  ?  Some  poor  wretch 
will  lose  his  job,  you  know,  if  Eleanor  finds  out  about  this. 
When  I'm  in  this  room,  sacred  to  reflection  and  research,  it's 
a  first-class  crime  to  let  me  be  disturbed." 

It  didn't  need  his  sardonic  grin  to  point  the  satire  of  hia 
words.  The  way  he  had  uttered  "sacred  to  reflection  and  re 
search,"  was  positively  savage. 

Rodney  said  curtly,  "Eleanor  sent  me  up  herself.  I  didn't 
much  want  to  come,  to  tell  the  truth,  when  I  heard  you  were 
busy." 

"Eleanor!"  her  husband  repeated.  "I  thought  she'd  gone 
out — with  her  poodle." 

Rodney  said,  with  unconcealed  distaste,  "They  were  on  the 
point  of  going  out  when  I  came  in.  That's  how  Eleanor  hap 
pened  to  see  me." 

With  a  visible  effort,  Randolph  recovered  a  more  normal 
manner.  "I'm  glad  it  happened  that  way,"  he  said.  "Get 
yourself  a  drink.  You'll  find  anything  you  want  over  there, 
I  guess,  and  something  to  smoke;  then  we'll  sit  down  and 
have  an  old-fashioned  talk." 

The  source  of  drinks  he  indicated  was  a  well-stocked  cel- 
larette  at  the  other  side  of  the  room.  But  Rodney's  eye  fell 
first  on  a  decanter  and  siphon  on  the  table,  within  reach  of 
the  chair  Randolph  had  been  sitting  in.  His  host's  glance  fol 
lowed  his. 

"This  is  Bourbon  I've  got  over  here,"  he  added.  "I  suppose 
you  prefer  Scotch." 

"I  don't  believe  I  want  anything  more  to  drink  just  now," 
Rodney  said.  And  as  he  turned  to  the  smoking  table  to  get  a 
cigar,  Randolph  allowed  himself  another  sardonic  grin. 

The  preliminaries  were  gone  through  rather  elaborately; 
chairs  drawn  up  and  adjusted,  ash-trays  put  within  reach; 
cigars  got  going  satisfactorily.  But  the  talk  they  were  sup 
posed  to  prepare  the  way  for  didn't  at  once  begin. 


496  THE    EEAL    ADVENTUEE 

Eandolph  took  another  stiffish  drink  and  settled  back  into 
a  dull  sullen  abstraction. 

Eodney  wanted  to  say,  "I  hear  from  Eose  you  had  a  little 
visit  with  her  in  New  York."  But,  with  his  host's  mood  what 
it  was,  he  shrank  from  introducing  that  topic.  Finally,  for 
the  sake  of  saying  something,  he  remarked: 

"This  is  a  wonderful  room,  isn't  it?" 

Eandolph  roused  himself.  "Never  been  in  here  before  ?"  he 
asked. 

"I've  never  been  in  the  house  before,  I'm  ashamed  to  say." 

"What!"  Eandolph  cried.  "My  God!  Well,  then,  come 
along." 

Eodney  resisted  a  little.  He  was  comfortable.  They  could 
look  over  the  house  later.  But  Eandolph  wouldn't  listen. 

"That's  the  first  thing  to  do,"  he  insisted.  "Indispensable 
preliminary.  You  can't  enjoy  the  opera  without  a  libretto. 
Come  along." 

It  was  a  remarkable  house.  Before  the  first  fifteen  minutes 
of  their  inspection  were  over,  Eodney  had  come  to  the  conclu 
sion  that  though  Bertie  Willis  might  be  an  ass,  was  indeed  an 
indisputable  ass,  he  was  no  fool.  It  was  almost  uncannily 
clever,  the  way  all  the  latest  devices  for  modern  comfort  wore, 
so  demurely;  the  mask  of  a  perfectly  consistent  medievalism. 
And  there  were  some  effects  that  were  really  magnificent.  The 
view  of  the  drawing-room,  for  instance,  from  the  recessed 
dais  at  the  far  end  of  it,  where  the  grand  piano  stood — a 
piano  that  contrived  to  look  as  if  it  might  have  been  played 
upon  by  the  second  wife  of  Henry  VIII, — down  toward  the 
magnificent  stone  chimney  at  the  other ;  the  octagonal  dining- 
room  with  the  mysterious  audacity  of  its  lighting ;  the  kitchen 
with  its  flag  floor  (only  they  were  not  flags,  but  an  artful 
linoleum),  its  great  wrought-iron  chains  and  hoods  beneath 
which  all  the  cooking  was  done — by  electricity. 

Eandolph  took  him  over  the  whole  thing  from  bottom  to 
top.  Through  it  all,  he  kept  up  the  glib  patter  of  a  show 
man  ;  the  ironic  intent  of  it  becoming  more  and  more  marked 
all  the  while. 

They  brought  up  at  last  in  the  study  they  had  started  from. 


A   BROKEN    PARALLEL  49? 

"Oh,  but  wait  a  moment!"  Randolph  said.  "Here's  two 
more  rooms  for  you  to  see." 

The  first  one  explained  its  purpose  at  a  glance,  with  a  desk 
and  typewriter,  and  filing  cabinets  around  the  walls. 

"Rubber  floor,"  Randolph  pointed  out,  "felt  ceiling;  abso 
lutely  sound-proof.  Here's  where  my  stenographer  sits  all 
day,  ready, — like  a  fireman.  And  this,"  he  concluded,  lead 
ing  the  way  to  the  other  room,  "is  the  holy  of  holies." 

It  had  a  rubber  floor,  too,  and  Rodney  supposed,  a  felt  ceil 
ing.  But  its  only  furniture  was  one  straight-back  chair  and 
a  canvas  cot. 

"Sound-proof  too,"  said  Randolph.  "But  sounding-boards 
or  something  in  all  the  walls.  I  press  this  button,  start  a 
dictaphone,  and  talk  in  any  direction,  anywhere.  It's  all 
taken  down.  Here's  where  I'm  supposed  to  think,  make  dis 
coveries,  and  things.  No  distractions.  One  hundred  per 
cent,  efficient.  My  God!  I  tried  it  for  a  while.  Felt  like  a 
fool  actor  in  a  Belasco  play.  Do  you  remember?  The  one 
uitli  the  laboratory  and  the  doctor?" 

They  went  back  into  the  study. 

"Clever  beasts,  though — poodles,"  he  remarked,  as  he 
nodded  Rodney  to  his  chair  and  poured  himself  another 
drink.  "Learn  their  tricks  very  nicely.  But  good  Heavens, 
Aldrich,  think  of  him  as  a  man!  Think  what  our  American 
married  women  are  up  against,  when  they  want  somebody  to 
play  off  against  their  husbands  and  have  to  fall  back  on  tired 
little  beasts  like  that.  In  all  the  older  countries  there  are 
plenty  of  men,  real  men  who've  got  something,  that  a  married 
woman  can  fall  back  on.  But  think  of  a  woman  of  Eleanor's 
attractions  having  to  take  up  a  thing  like  that.  There's  noth 
ing  else  for  her.  Would  you  come  around  and  hold  her  hand 
and  make  love  to  her,  or  any  other  man  like  you?  Not  once 
in  a  thousand  times.  Eleanor  doesn't  mean  anything.  She's 
trying  to  make  me  jealous.  That's  her  newest  experiment. 
But  it's  downright  pitiful,  I  say." 

Rodney  got  up  out  of  his  chair.  It  wasn't  a  possible  con 
versation. 

"I'll  be  running  along,  I  think,"  he  said.     "I've  a  lot  of 


498  THE   EEAL   ADVEXTURE 

proof  to  correct  to-night,  and  you've  got  work  of  your  own, 
I  expect." 

"Sit  down  again,"  said  Randolph  sharply.  "I'm  just  get 
ting  drunk.  But  that  can  wait.  I'm  going  to  talk.  I've  got 
to  talk.  And  if  you  go,  I  swear  I'll  call  up  Eleanor's  butler 
and  talk  to  him.  You'll  keep  it  to  yourself,  anyway." 

He  added,  as  Rodney  hesitated,  "I  want  to  tell  you  about 
Rose.  I  saw  her  in  New  York,  you  know." 

Rodney  sat  down  again.  "Yes,"  he  said,  "so  she  wrote.  Tell 
me  how  she  looked.  She's  been  working  tremendously  hard, 
and  I'm  a  little  afraid  she's  overdoing  it." 

"She  looks,"  Randolph  said  very  deliberately,  "a  thousand 
years  old."  He  laughed  at  the  sharp  contraction  of  Rodney's 
brows.  "Oh,  not  like  that !  She's  as  beautiful  as  ever.  More. 
Facial  planes  just  a  hair's  breadth  more  defined  perhaps — a 
bit  more  of  what  that  painter  Burton  calls  edge.  But  not  a 
line,  not  a  mark.  Her  skin's  still  got  that  bloom  on  it,  and 
she  still  flushes  up  when  she  smiles.  She's  lost  five  pounds, 
perhaps,  but  that's  just  condition.  And  vitality!  My  God  !— 
But  a  thousand  years  old  just  the  same." 

"I'd  like  to  know  what  you  mean  by  that,"  said  Rodney. 
He  added,  "if  you  mean  anything,"  but  the  words  were  un 
spoken. 

Randolph  did  mean  something. 

"Why,  look  here,"  he  said.  "You  know  what  a  kid  she  was 
when  you  married  her.  Schoolgirl !  I  used  to  tell  her  things 
and  she'd  listen,  all  eyes — holding  her  breath!  Until  I  felt 
almost  as  wise  as  she  thought  I  was.  She  was  always  game, 
even  then.  If  she  started  a  thing,  she  saw  it  through.  If  she 
said,  'Tell  it  to  me  straight,'  why  she  took  it,  whatever  it 
might  be,  standing  up.  She  wasn't  afraid  of  anything.  Cour 
age  of  innocence.  Because  she  didn't  know. 

"Well,  she's  courageous  now,  because  she  knows.  She's 
been  through  it  all  and  beaten  it  all,  and  she  knows  she  can 
beat  it  again.  She  understands — I  tell  you — everything. 

"Why,  look  here !  We  all  but  ran  into  each  other  on  the  cor 
ner,  there,  of  Broadway  and  Forty-second  Street ;  shook  hands, 
said  howdy-do.  How  long  was  I  here  for  ?  Was  Eleanor  with 


A   BROKEN   PARALLEL  499 

me  ?  And  so  on.  If  I  had  a  spare  half -hour,  would  I  come 
in  and  have  tea  with  her  at  the  Knickerbocker  ?  She'd  nodded 
at  two  or  three  passing  people  while  we  stood  there.  And  then 
somebody  said,  'Hello,  Dane/  and  stopped.  A  miserable,  shabby, 
shivering  little  painted  thing.  Rose  said,  'Hello/  and  asked  how 
she  was  getting  along.  Was  she  working  now  ?  She  said  no ;  did 
Rose  know  of  anything  ?  Rose  said,  'Give  me  your  address  and 
if  I  can  find  anything,  I'll  let  you  know/  The  horrible  little 
beast  told  where  she  lived  and  went  away.  Rose  didn't  say 
anything  to  me,  except  that  she  was  somebody  who'd  been 
out  in  a  road  company  with  her.  But  there  was  a  look  in  her 
eyes  .  .  . !  Oh,  she  knew — everything.  Knew  what  that 
kid  was  headed  for.  Knew  there  was  nothing  to  be  done  about 
it.  She  had  no  flutters  about  it,  didn't  pull  a  long  face,  didn't, 
as  I  told  you,  say  a  word.  But  there  was  a  look  in  her  eyes, 
behind  her  eyes,  somehow,  that  understood  and  faced — God ! — 
everything.  And  then  we  went  in  and  had  our  tea. 

"I  had  a  thousand  curiosities  about  her.  I'd  have  found  out 
anything  I  could.  But  it  was  she  who  did  the  finding  out. 
Beyond  inquiring  about  you,  how  lately  I'd  seen  you,  and  so 
on,  she  hardly  asked  a  question;  talked  about  indifferent 
things :  New  York,  the  theaters,  how  we  passed  the  time  out 
here,  I  don't  know  what.  But  pretty  soon  I  saw  that  she 
understood  me,  saw  right  into  me  like  through  an  open  win 
dow  into  a  lighted  room.  As  easily  as  that.  She  knew  what 
was  the  matter  with  me ;  knew  what  I'd  made  of  myself.  And 
by  God,  Aldrich,  she  didn't  even  despise  me ! 

"I  came  back  here  to  kick  this  damned  thing  to  pieces,  give 
myself  a  fresh  start.  And  when  I  got  here,  I  hadn't  the  sand. 
I  get  drunk  instead." 

He  poured  himself  another  long  drink  and  sipped  it  slowly. 

"Everybody  knows,"  he  said  at  last,  "that  prostitutes  al 
most  invariably  take  to  drugs  or  drink.  But  I  know  why 
they  do." 

That  remark  stung  Rodney  out  of  his  long  silence.  During 
the  whole  of  Randolph's  recital  of  his  encounter  with  Rose, 
he'd  never  once  lifted  his  eyes  from  the  gray  ash  of  his  cigar, 
and  the  violet  filament  of  smoke  that  arose  from  it.  He  didn't 


500  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

want  to  look  at  Randolph,  nor  think  about  him.  Just  wanted 
to  remember  every  word  he  said,  so  that  he  could  carry  the 
picture  away  intact.  Now  that  the  picture  was  finished,  he 
wanted  to  get  out  of  that  room  with  it;  out  into  the  dark 
and  loneliness  of  the  streets,  where  he  could  walk  and  think. 

There  was  something  peculiarly  horrifying  to  him  in  the 
exhibition  Randolph  was  making  of  himself.  He'd  never  in 
his  life  taken  a  drink,  except  convivially,  and  then  he  took  as 
little  as  would  pass  muster.  He'd  always  found  it  hard  to  be 
sensibly  tolerant  of  the  things  men  said  and  did  in  liquor, 
even  when  their  condition  had  overtaken  them  unawares.  Go 
ing  off  alone  and  deliberately  fuddling  one's  self  as  a  means 
of  escaping  unpleasant  realities,  struck  him  as  an  act  of  the 
basest  cowardice.  Whether  Randolph's  revelation  of  himself 
were  true  or  distorted  by  alcohol,  didn't  seem  much  to  matter. 
But  for  that  picture  of  Rose,  he'd  have  gone  long  ago  and  left 
the  man  to  his  bemused  reflections.  Only  .  .  . 

He'd  said  that  Rose  understood  everything  and  didn't  de 
spise  him.  A  drunken  fancy  likely  enough.  She  had  seen 
something  though.  Her  letter  proved  that.  And  having  seen 
it,  she'd  asked  him  to  drop  in  on  the  doctor  for  a  visit.  Did 
she  mean  she  wanted  him  to  try  to  help  ? 

He  tried,  though  not  very  successfully,  to  conceal  his  violent 
disrelish  of  the  task,  when  he  said: 

"Look  here,  Jim !  What  the  devil  is  the  matter  with  you  ? 
Are  you  sober  enough  to  tell  me  ?" 

Randolph  put  down  his  glass.  "I  have  told  you,"  he  said. 
"It's  a  thing  that  can  be  told  in  one  word.  I'm  a  prostitute. 
I'm  Eleanor's  kept  man.  Well  kept,  oh,  yes.  Beautifully  kept. 
I'm  nothing  in  God's  world  but  a  possession  of  hers  !  A  trophy 
of  sorts,  an  ornament.  I'm  something  she's  made.  I  have  a 
hell  of  a  big  practise.  I'm  the  most  fashionable  doctor  in 
Chicago.  They  come  here,  the  women,  damn  them,  in  shoals. 
That's  Eleanor's  doing.  I'm  a  faker,  a  fraud,  a  damned  actor. 
I  pose  for  them.  I  play  up.  I  give  them  what  they  want. 
And  that's  her  doing.  They  go  silly  about  me ;  fancy  they're 
in  love  with  me.  That's  what  she  wants  them  to  do.  It  in 
creases  my  value  for  her  as  a  possession. 


A    BROKEX    PARALLEL  501 

* 

"I  haven't  done  a  lick  of  honest  work  in  the  last  year.  I 
can't  work.  She  won't  let  me  work.  She — smothers  me. 
Wherever  I  turn,  there  she  is,  smoothing  things  out,  trying  to 
making  it  easy,  trying  to  anticipate  my  wants.  I've  only  one 
want.  That's  to  be  let  alone.  She  can't  do  that.  She's  in 
satiable.  She  can't  help  it.  There's  something  drives  her  on 
so  that  she  never  can  feel  sure  that  she  possesses  me  com 
pletely  enough.  There's  always  something  more  she's  trying 
to  get,  and  I'm  always  trying  to  keep  something  away  from 
her,  and  failing. 

"And  why?  Do  you  want  to  know  why,  Aldrich?  That's 
the  cream  of  the  thing.  Because  we're  so  damnably  in  love 
with  each  other.  She  wants  me  to  live  on  her  love.  To  have 
nothing  else  to  live  on.  Do  you  know  why  she  won't  have 
any  children?  Because  she's  jealous  of  them.  Afraid  they'd 
get  between  us.  She  tries  to  make  me  jealous  with  that  poodle 
of  hers — and  she  succeeds.  With  that !  I'd  like  to  wring  his 
neck. 

"Do  you  want  to  know  what  my  notion  of  Heaven  is?  It 
would  be  to  go  off  alone,  with  one  suit  of  clothes  in  a  hand 
bag,  oh,  and  fifty  or  a  hundred  dollars  in  my  pocket — I 
wouldn't  mind  that;  I  don't  want  to  be  a  tramp — to  some 
mining  town,  or  mill  town,  or  slum,  where  I  could  start  a 
general  practise;  where  the  things  I'd  get  would  be  accident 
cases,  confinement  cases ;  real  things,  urgent  things,  that  night 
and  day  are  all  alike  to.  I'd  like  to  start  again  and  be  poor ; 
get  this  stink  of  easy  money  out  of  my  nostrils.  I'd  like  to  see 
if  I  could  make  good  on  my  own ;  have  something  I  could  look 
at  and  say,  'That's  mine.  I  did  that.  I  had  to  sweat  for  it/ 

"I've  been  thinking  about  that  for  two  years.  It  makes  quite 
a  fancy-picture.  There  are  a  million  details  I  can  fill  into  it. 
A  rotten  little  office  over  a  drug-store  somewhere ;  people  com 
ing  in  with  real  ills,  and  I  curing  them  up  and  charging  them 
a  dollar,  and  sending  them  away  happy.  I  smoke  a  pipe  be 
cause  I  can't  afford  cigars;  get  my  meals  at  lunch-counters. 
I  sit  up  here — in  this  room — and  think  about  it. 

"I  came  back  from  New  York,  after  that  look  at  Rose, 
meaning  to  do  it;  meaning  to  talk  it  out  with  Eleanor  and 


502 

• 

tell  her  why,  and  then  go.  Well,,  I  talked.  Talk's  cheap. 
But  I  didn't  go.  I'll  never  go.  I'll  go  on  getting  softer  and 
more  of  a  fake;  more  dependent.  And  Eleanor  will  go  on 
eating  me  up,  until  the  last  thing  in  me  that's  me  myself,  is 
gone.  And  then,  some  day,  she'll  look  at  me  and  see  that  I'm 
nothing.  That  I  have  nothing  left  to  love  her  with." 

Then,  with  suddenly  thickened  speech  (an  affectation,  per 
haps)  he  looked  up  at  Rodney  and  demanded: 

"What  the  hell  are  you  looking  so  s-solemn  ahout  ?  Can't 
you  take  a  joke?  Come  along  and  have  another  drink.  The 
night's  young." 

"No,"  Rodney  said,  "I'm;  going.  And  you'd  better  get  to 
bed." 

"A  couple  more  drinks,"  Randolph  said,  "to  put  the  cap  on 
a  jolly  evening.  Always  get  drunk  th-thoroughly.  Then 
in  the  morning,  you  wake  up  a  wiser  man.  Wise  enough  to 
forget  what  a  damned  fool  you've  been.  You  don't  want  to 
forget  that,  Aldrich.  You've  been  drunk  and  you've  talked 
like  a  damned  fool.  And  I've  been  drunk  and  I've  talked  like 
a  damned  fool.  But  we'll  both  be  wiser  in  the  morning." 

Rodney  walked  home  that  night  like  a  man  dazed.  The 
vividness  of  one  blazing  idea  blinded  him.  The  thing  that 
Randolph  had  seen  and  lacked  the  courage  to  do;  the  thing 
Rodney  despised  him  for  a  coward  for  liaving  failed  to  do, 
that  thing  Rose  had  done.  Line  by  line,  the  parallel  presented 
itself  to  him,  as  the  design  comes  through  in  a  half-developed 
photographic  plate. 

Without  knowing  it,  yielding  to  a  blind,  unscrutinized  in 
stinct,  he'd  wanted  Rose  to  live  on  his  love.  He'd  tried  to 
smooth  things  out  for  her,  anticipate  her  wants.  He'd 
wanted  her  soft,  helpless,  dependent.  As  a  trophy?  That 
was  what  Randolph  had  said.  Had  lie  been  as  bad  as  that? 
From  what  other  desire  of  his  than  that  could  have  come  the 
sting  of  exasperation  he'd  always  felt  when  she'd  urged  him  to 
let  her  work  for  him ;  help  him  to  economize,  dust  and  make 
beds,  so  that  he  could  go  on  writing  his  book?  She'd  seen, 
even  then,  something  he'd  been  blind  to — something  he'd 


A    BROKEN"    PARALLEL  503 

blinded  himself  to ;  that  love,  by  itself,  WM  not  enough.  That 
it  could  poison,  as  well  as  feed. 

And,  seeing,  she  had  the  courage  .  .  .  He  pressed  his 
hands  against  his  eyes. 

When  there  could  be  friendship  as  well  as  love  between 
them,  she  said,  she'd  come  back.  Would  she  come  back  now, 
even  for  his  friendship?  He  doubted  it.  Dared  not  hope. 
There  came  up  before  him,  that  face  of  frozen  agony  that  had 
confronted  him  in  the  room  on  Clark  Street,  and  he  remem 
bered  what  she'd  said  then — with  a  shudder — about  it  all  end 
ing  "like  this."  Ending! 

His  love  had  played  her  false;  had  tried,  instinctively,  to 
smother  her,  and  defeated  at  that,  had  outraged  and  tortured 
her.  She  couldn't  possibly  look  at  it  any  way  but  that.  And 
now  that  she  was  free,  self-discovered,  victorious,  was  it  likely 
she  would  submit  to  its  blind  caprices  again?  The  thing 
Randolph  had  said  was  his  notion  of  Heaven,  she'd  trium 
phantly  attained.  Wouldn't  it  be  her  notion  of  Heaven  too? 

But  she  had  won,  among  the  rest  of  her  spoils  of  victory, 
the  thing  she  had  originally  set  out  to  get.  His  friendship 
and  respect.  Friendship,  he  remembered  her  saying,  was  a 
thing  you  had  to  earn.  When  you'd  earned  it,  it  couldn't  be 
withheld  from  you.  Well,  it  was  right  she  should  be  told 
that;  made  to  understand  it  to  the  full.  He  couldn't  ask 
her  to  come  back  to  him.  But  she  must  know  that  her  respect 
was  as  necessary  now  to  him,  as  she'd  once  said  his  was  to 
her.  He  must  tell  her  that.  He  must  see  her  and  tell  her 
that. 

He  stopped  abruptly  in  his  walk.  His  bones,  as  the  Psalmist 
said,  turned  to  water.  How  should  he  confront  that  gaze  of 
hers,  which  knew  so  much  and  understood  so  deeply — he  with 
the  memory  of  his  two  last  ignominious  encounters  with  her, 
behind  him? 


CHAPTEE  III 

FBTENDS 

EXCEPT  for  tlie  vacuum  where  the  core  and  heart  of  it  all 
ought  to  have  been,  Eose's  life  in  New  York  during  the  year 
that  put  her  on  the  high  road  to  success  as  a  designer  of  cos 
tumes  for  the  theater,  was  a  good  life,  broadening,  stimulat 
ing,  seasoning.  It  rested,  to  begin  with,  on  a  foundation  of 
adequate  material  comfort  which  the  unwonted  physical  priva 
tions  of  the  six  months  that  preceded  it — the  room  on  Clark 
Street,  the  nightmare  tour  on  the  road,  and  even  the  little 
back  room  in  Miss  Gibbons'  apartment  over  the  drug-store  in 
Centropolis — made  seem  like  positive  luxury. 

After  a  preliminary  fortnight  in  a  little  hotel  off  Washing 
ton  Square,  which  she  had  heard  Jane  Lake  speak  of  once  as 
a  possible  place  for  a  respectable  young  woman  of  modest 
means  to  live  in,  she  found  an  apartment  in  Thirteenth  Street, 
not  far  west  of  Sixth  Avenue.  It  was  in  a  quiet  block  of  old 
private  residences.  But  this  building  was  clean  and  new, 
with  plenty  of  white  tile  and  modern  plumbing,  and  an 
elevator.  Her  apartment  had  two  rooms  in  it,  one  of  them 
really  spacious  to  poor  Eose  after  what  she'd  been  taking  for 
granted  lately,  besides  a  nice  white  bathroom  and  a 
kitchenette.  She  paid  thirty-seven  dollars  a  month  for  it, 
and  five  dollars  a  month  for  a  share  in  a  charwoman  who  came 
in  every  day  and  made  her  bed  and  washed  up  dishes. 

The  extensiveness  of  this  domestic  establishment  fright 
ened  her  a  little  at  first.  But  she  reassured  herself  with  the 
reflection  that  under  the  rule  Gertrude  Morse  had  quoted  to 
her,  one  week's  pay  for  one  month's  rent,  she  still  had  a  com 
fortable  margin.  She  furnished  it  a  bit  at  a  time,  with  arti 
cles  chosen  in  the  order  of  their  indispensability,  and  she 
went  on,  during  the  summer,  to  buy  some  things  which  were 

504 


FRIENDS  505 

not  indispensable  at  all.  But  not  very  many.  Like  most  per 
sons  with  a  highly  specialized  creative  talent  for  one  form  of 
beauty  (in  her  case  this  was  clothes)  she  was  more  or  less 
indifferent  about  others.  Witness  how  little  interest  she  had 
taken  in  the  labored  beauties  of  Florence  McCrea's  house, 
even  in  the  unthinking  days  before  she  had  begun  worrying 
about  the  expense  of  that  establishment.  Her  indifference  had 
always  made  Portia  boil.  Also  it  may  be  noted,  that  Florence 
McCrea  herself,  always  went  about  looking  a  perfect  frump. 

So  that,  by  the  time  Eose's  apartment  was  furnished  to  the 
point  of  adequate  comfort  and  decency,  she  took  it  for  granted 
and  stopped  there.  For  her,  the  temptations  of  old  brass, 
mezzo-tints,  and  Italian  majolica — Fourth  Avenue  generally 
— simply  did  not  exist. 

She  bought  real  china  to  eat  her  breakfasts  out  of,  and  the 
occasional  suppers  she  had  at  home.  She  had  had  enough  of 
thick  cups  and  plates  in  the  last  six  months  to  last  her  the  rest 
of  her  life.  And  it  is  probable  that  she  ate  up,  literally,  the 
margin  she  had  under  Gertrude  Morse's  rule,  in  somewhat 
better  restaurants  than  she  need  have  patronized. 

She  did  save  money  though,  and  put  it  away  in  a  safe  bank. 
But  she  never  saved  quite  so  much  as  she  was  always  meaning 
to,  and  she  carried  along,  for  months  after  she  went  to  work 
for  Galbraith,  an  almost  guilty  sense  of  luxury. 

In  spite  of  the  fact  that  she  was  working  very  hard  and  of 
the  further  fact  that  her  hours  of  labor  were  largely  coincident 
with  the  leisure  hours  of  other  people,  she  made  a  good  many 
friends.  The  first  of  these  was  Gertrude  Morse,  and  it  was 
through  her,  directly  or  indirectly,  that  she  acquired  the 
others. 

Gertrude  was  Abe  Shuman's  confidential  secretary  and 
you  can  get  a  fairly  good  working  notion  of  her  by  conceiving 
the  type  of  person  likely  to  be  found  in  the  borderland  of 
theatrical  enterprises,  and  then,  in  all  respects,  taking  the 
exact  antithesis  of  it.  She  was  a  brisk,  prim-mannered,  snub- 
nosed  little  thing,  who  wore  her  hair  brushed  down  as  flat 
as  possible  and  showed  an  affection  for  mannish  clothes.  She 
had  a  level  head,  a  keen  and  rather  biting  wit,  which  had  the 


506  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

effect  of  making  her  constant  acts  of  kindness  always  unex 
pected;  and  an  education  which,  in  her  surroundings,  seemed 
almost  fantastic.  She  was  a  Radcliff  Master  of  Arts. 

Every  one  who  had  any  dealings  with  Abe  Shuman  perforce 
knew  Gertrude,  and  Rose  got  acquainted  with  her  the  first 
day.  Galbraith  introduced  them  in  Shuman's  office,  and  Rose 
found  herself  being  investigated  by  a  bright,  penetrating  and 
decidedly  complex  look  which  she  interpreted — pretty  accu 
rately  as  she  found  out  later — as  saying,  "Well,  you're  about 
what  I  expected;  ornamental  and  enthusiastic;  just  what  an 
otherwise  sane  and  successful  man  of  fifty  would  pick  out  for 
an  'assistant/  Aren't  they  just  ch  ildren  at  that  age !  But 
you're  welcome.  They  deserve  it.  Good  luck  to  you !" 

But  when  Rose  returned  the  look  with  a  comprehending 
smile  which  said  good-naturedly,  "All  right !  You  wait  and 
see,"  Gertrude's  expression  altered  into  a  frankly  questioning 
frown.  Two  or  three  days  later  she  dropped  in  at  a  rehearsal, 
ostensibly  with  a  message  from  Shuman  to  Galbraith.  He 
was  on  the  point  of  leaving  and  had  turned  over  the  rehearsal 
to  Rose.  Gertrude,  when  he  had  gone,  settled  down  com 
fortably  in  the  back  of  the  auditorium  and  watched  through 
a  solid  hour,  obviously  under  instructions  from  Abe  to  bring 
back  a  report  as  to  whether  Galbraith's  infatuation  should  be 
tolerated  or  suppressed.  At  the  end  of  the  hour,  during  a 
brief  lull  in  the  rehearsal,  she  came  down  the  aisle  and  stopped 
beside  Rose  who  still  had  her  eye  on  the  stage. 

"I  apologize,"  she  said. 

Rose  grinned  around  at  her.  It  was  not  necessary  to  ask 
what  for.  "Much  obliged,"  she  said. 

"I  didn't  know  that  a  woman  could  do  that,"  Gertrude 
went  on.  "Didn't  think  she'd  have  the — drive.  But  you've 
got  it,  all  right.  I  don't  suppose  you've  got  an  idea  when 
you'll  be  free  for  lunch?" 

Rose  hadn't,  but  it  was  not  many  days  before  they  got  to 
gether  for  that  meal  at  a  business  woman's  club  down  on  For 
tieth  Street,  and  from  then  on  their  acquaintance  progressed 
rapidly.  She  helped  Rose  find  the  little  apartment  on  Thir 
teenth  Street,  entertaining  her  during  the  search  with  a  highly 


FRIENDS  507 

instinctive  disquisition  on  the  social  topography  of  New  York, 
and  on  the  following  Sunday  she  ran  in,  she  said,  to  see  if 
she  could  help  her  get  settled.  There  was  no  settling  to  do, 
but  she  sat  down  and  talked — most  of  the  time — for  an  hour 
or  so.  It  was  a  theory  of  Gertrude's  that  the  way  to  find  out 
about  people  was  to  talk  to  them. 

"You  can't  tell  much,"  she  used  to  say,  "by  the  things 
people  say  to  you.  Perhaps  they've  just  heard  somebody  else 
say  them.  Maybe  they've  got  a  repertory  that  it  will  take  you 
weeks  to  get  to  the  end  of.  Or  they  may  not  be  able  to  show 
you  at  all  what's  really  inside  them.  But  from  how  they 
take  the  things  you  say  to  them — the  things  they  light  up  at 
and  the  things  they  look  blank  about,  the  things  they're  too 
anxious  to  show  you  they  understand,  and  the  things  they  dare 
admit  they  never  heard  of — you  can  tell  every  time.  Find  out 
all  you  want  to  know  about  anybody  in  an  hour!" 

Rose,  it  seemed,  reacted  satisfactorily  to  her  tests,  since  she 
was  introduced  as  rapidly  thereafter  as  their  scanty  leisure 
made  possible,  to  Gertrude's  more  immediate  circle  of  friends. 

During  that  first  winter,  she  enjoyed  them  immensely. 
They  were  all  interesting;  all  "did  things";  widely  various 
things,  yet,  somehow,  related.  There  was  a  red-haired  fire 
brand  whose  specialty  seemed  to  be  bailing  out  girls  arrested 
for  picketing  and  whose  Sunday  diversion  consisted  in  going 
down  to  Paterson,  New  Jersey,  making  the  police  ridiculous 
and  unhappy  for  an  hour  or  so,  delivering  herself  of  a  speech 
in  defiance  of  their  preventive  efforts  and  finally  escaping  ar 
rest  by  a  hair's  breadth.  They  got  her  finally  but  since  she 
enjoyed  the  privilege  of  addressing  as  Uncle  a  man  whose 
name  was  uttered  with  awe  about  the  corner  of  Broad  Street 
and  Exchange  Place,  they  had  to  let  her  go. 

There  was  a  young  woman  lawyer,  associated  with  Gertrude 
in  an  organization  for  getting  jobs  for  girls  who  had  just  been 
let  out  of  jail,  a  level-headed  enterprise,  which  by  conserving 
its  efforts  for  those  who  really  wished  to  benefit  by  them,  man 
aged  to  accomplish  a  good  deal.  One  of  their  circle  was  asso 
ciate  editor  of  a  popular  magazine  and  another  wrote  short 
stories,  mostly  about  shop-girls.  The  last  one  of  them  for 


508  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

Rose  to  meet,  she  having  been  out  of  town  all  summer,  was 
Alice  Perosini.  She  was  the  daughter  of  a  rich  Italian  Jew, 
a  beautiful — really  a  wonderful  person  to  look  at — but  a  little 
unaccountable,  especially  with  the  gorgeous  clothes  she  wore, 
in  their  circle.  Rose  took  her  time  about  deciding  that  she 
liked  her  but  ended  by  preferring  her  to  all  the  rest.  She 
never  talked  much;  would  smoke  and  listen,  making  most  of 
her  comments  in  pantomime,  but  she  had  a  trick  of  capping  a 
voluble  discussion  with  a  hard-chiseled  phrase  which,  whether 
you  felt  it  precisely  fitted  or  not,  you  found  it  difficult  to 
escape  from. 

What  forced  Rose  to  a  realization  of  her  preference  for 
Alice  was  the  impulse  to  tell  her  who  she  really  was  and  the 
suddenly  following  reflection  that  she  never  had  wanted  to 
tell  any  of  the  others;  that  she  had  taken  care  to  avoid  all 
reference  to  the  husband  and  the  babies  she  had  fled  from  in 
search  of  a  life  of  her  own. 

She  never  tried  to  explain  to  herself  the  feeling  that  im 
posed  this  reticence  on  her,  until  the  discovery  that  it  didn't 
exist  toward  Alice.  She  couldn't  have  feared  that  they  would 
not  approve  of  what  she  had  done ;  it  squared  so  exactly  with 
all  their  ideas.  Indeed  the  one  real  bond  between  them  was 
a  common  revolt  against  the  traditional  notion  that  the  way 
for  a  woman  to  effect  her  will  in  the  world  was  by  "in 
fluencing"  a  man.  They  wanted  to  hold  the  world  in  their 
own  hands.  Tbey  contemned  the  "feminine"  arts  of  cajolery. 
They  wanted  no  odds  from  anybody.  There  wasn't  a  real 
man-hater  in  the  crowd,  they  were  too  normal  and  healthy  for 
that.  But  they  didn't  talk  much  about  men;  never,  as  far 
as  Rose  knew,  about  men — as  such.  Was  the  topic  sup 
pressed,  she  wondered,  or  was  it  just  that  they  didn't  think 
about  them? 

That  question  made  her  realize  how  little  she  knew  of  any 
of  them;  how  limited  was  the  range  of  their  intercourse.  It 
was  as  if  they  met  in  a  sort  of  mental  gymnasium,  fenced  with 
one  another,  did  callisthenics.  Oh,  that  was  going  too  far,  of 
course;  it  was  more  real  than  that.  But  it  was  true  that  it 
was  only  their  minds  that  met.  And  it  seemed  to  be  true 


FRIENDS  509 

that  in  the  realm  of  mind  they  were  content  to  live.  Had  they, 
like  herself,  deep  labyrinthine,  half-lit  caverns  down  under 
neath  those  north-lighted,  logically  ordered  apartments  where 
Rose  always  found  them?  If  they  had  they  never  let  her  or 
one  another  suspect  it. 

They'd  be  capable  of  deciding  the  great  issue  between  her 
self  and  Rodney,  if  ever  they  were  told  the  story,  in  a  half 
dozen  brisk  sentences.  Rose  would  be  held  to  have  been  right 
and  Rodney  wrong,  demonstrably.  Rose,  illogically,  perhaps, 
shrank  from  that  conclusion  or  at  least  from  having  it  reached 
that  way.  There  was  more  to  it  than  that.  There  were 
elements  in  the  situation  they  wouldn't  know  how  to  allow  for. 

But  Alice  Perosini,  she  thought,  was  different.  She'd  be 
able  to  make  some  of  those  allowances.  Rose  didn't  tell  her 
the  story  but  she  felt  that  at  a  pinch  she  could  and  this  feel 
ing  was  enough  to  establish  Alice  on  a  different  basis  from 
the  others.  It  was  with  Alice  that  she  discussed  the  more 
personal  sort  of  problems  that  arose  in  connection  with  her 
new  job.  (One  of  these,  as  you  are  to  be  told,  was  highly 
personal.)  And  when  the  question  came  up  of  finding  the 
capital  that  would  enable  her  to  make  the  Shumans  a  bid  on 
all  the  costumes  for  Come  On  In  it  was  Alice,  who,  with  all 
the  sang-froid  in  the  world,  sketched  out  the  articles  of  part 
nership  and  brought  her  in  a  certified  check  for  three  thou 
sand  dollars. 

The  fact  that  they  had  become  partners  served,  somehow, 
to  divert  a  relation  between  them  which  might  otherwise  have 
developed  into  a  first-class  friendship.  Not  that  they  quar 
reled  or  even  disappointed  each  other  in  the  close  contacts  of 
the  day's  work.  They  were  admirably  complementary.  Alice 
had  the  business  acumen,  the  executive  grasp,  the  patient 
willingness  to  master  details,  which  were  needed  to  set  Rose 
free  for  the  more  imaginative  part  of  the  enterprise.  Both 
were  immensely  determined  on  success.  Alice  couldn't  have 
been  keener  about  it  if  every  cent  she  had  in  the  world  had 
been  embarked  in  the  business. 

But  at  the  end  of  the  day's  work  they  tended  to  fly  apart 
rather  than  to  stick  together.  Both  were  charged  with  the 


510  THE    EEAL   ADVENTURE 

same  kind  of  static  electricity.  It  was  an  instinct  they  were 
sensible  enough  to  follow.  Both  realized  that  they  were  more 
efficient  as  partners  from  not  going  too  intimately  into  each 
other's  outside  affairs. 

But  when  the  winter  had  passed  and  the  early  spring  had 
brought  its  triumph,  with  the  success  of  her  costumes  in  Come 
On  In,  and  when  the  inevitable  reaction  from  the  burst  of 
energy  that  had  won  that  triumph  had  taken  possession  of 
her,  Rose  found  herself  in  need  of  a  friendship  that  would 
grip  deeper,  understand  more.  And  with  the  realization  of 
the  need  of  it  she  found  she  had  it.  It  was  a  friendship  that 
had  grown  in  the  unlikeliest  soil  in  the  world,  the  friendship 
of  a  man  who  had  wanted  to  be  her  lover.  The  man  was  John 
Galbraith. 

For  the  first  month  after  she  came  to  New  York  to  work 
for  him  she  had  found  Galbraith  a  martinet.  She  never  once 
caught  that  twinkling  gleam  of  understanding  in  his  eye 
that  had  meant  so  much  to  her  during  the  rehearsals  of  The 
Girl  Up-stairs.  His  manner  toward  her  carried  out  the  tone 
of  the  letter  she'd  got  from  him  in  Centropolis.  It  was  stiff, 
formal,  severe.  He  seldom  praised  her  work  and  never  un 
grudgingly.  His  censure  was  rare  too,  to  be  sure,  but  this  ob 
viously  was  because  Rose  almost  never  gave  him  an  excuse  for 
it.  Of  course  she  was  up  to  her  work,  but,  well,  she  had  bet 
ter  be.  This,  in  a  nutshell,  was  his  attitude  toward  her.  Noth 
ing  but  the  undisputable  fact  that  she  was  up  to  her  work 
(Gertrude  was  comforting  here,  with  her  reticent  but  con 
vincing  reports  of  Abe  Shuman's  satisfaction  with  her)  kept 
Rose  from  losing  confidence.  Even  as  it  was,  working  for 
Galbraith  in  this  mood  gave  her  the  uneasy  sensation  one  ex 
periences  when  walking  abroad  under  a  sultry  overcast  sky 
with  mutterings  and  flashes  in  it.  And  then  one  night  the 
storm  broke. 

They  had  lingered  in  the  theater  after  the  dismissal  of  a 
rehearsal,  to  talk  over  a  change  in  one  of  the  numbers  Rose 
had  been  working  on.  It  refused  to  come  out  satisfactorily. 
Rose  thought  she  saw  a  way  of  doing  it  that  would  work  bet 
ter  and  she  had  been  telling  him  about  it.  Eagerly,  at  first, 


FEIENDS  511 

and  with  a  limpid  directness  which,  however,  became  clouded 
and  troubled  when  she  felt  he  wasn't  paying  attention.  It  was 
a  difficulty  with  him  she  had  encountered  before.  Some  strong 
preoccupation  she  could  neither  guess  the  nature  of  nor  lure 
him  away  from. 

But  to-night  after  an  angry  turn  down  the  aisle  and  back 
he  suddenly  cried  out,  "I  don't  know.  I  don't  know  what 
you've  been  talking  about.  I  don't  know  and  I  don't  care." 
And  then  confronting  her,  their  faces  not  a  foot  apart,  for  by 
now  she  had  got  to  her  feet,  his  hands  gripped  together 
and  shaking,  his  teeth  clenched,  his  eyes  glowing  there  in  the 
half-light  of  the  auditorium,  almost  like  an  animal's,  he  de 
manded,  "Can't  you  see  what's  the  matter  with  me  ?  Haven't 
you  seen  it  yet  ?  My  God !" 

Of  course  she  saw  it  now,  plainly  enough.  She  sat  down 
again,  managing  an  air  of  deliberation  about  it,  and  gripped 
the  back  of  the  orchestra  chair  in  front  of  her.  He  remained 
standing  over  her  there  in  the  aisle. 

When  the  heightening  tension  of  the  silence  that  followed 
this  outburst  had  grown  absolutely  unendurable  she  spoke. 
But  the  only  thing  she  could  find  to  say  was  almost  ludi 
crously  inadequate. 

"No,  I  didn't  see  it  until  now.    I'm.  sorry." 

"You  didn't  see  it,"  he  echoed.  "I  know  you  didn't.  You've 
never  seen  me  at  all,  from  the  beginning,  as  anything  but  a 
machine.  But  why  haven't  you  ?  You're  a  woman.  If  I  ever 
paw  a  woman  in  my  life  you're  one  all  the  way  through.  Why 
couldn't  you.  see  that  I  was  a  man  ?  It  isn't  because  I've  got 
gray  hair,  nor  because  I'm  fifty  years  old.  You  aren't  like 
that.  I  don't  believe  you're  like  that.  But  even  back  there 
in  Chicago,  the  night  we  walked  down  the  avenue  from  Less- 
ing's  store — or  the  night  we  had  supper  together  after  the 
show  .  .  ." 

"I  suppose  I  ought  to  have  seen,"  she  said  dully.  "Ought 
to  have  known  that  that  was  all  there  was  to  it.  That  there 
couldn't  be  anything  else  in  the  world.  But  I  didn't." 

"Well,  you  see  it  now,"  he  said  savagely  fairly,  and  strode 
away  up  the  aisle  and  then  back  to  her.  He  sat  down  in  the 


513  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

seat  in  front  of  her  and  turned  around.  "I  want  to  see  your 
face,"  he  said.  "There's  something  I've  got  to  know.  Some 
thing  you've  got  to  tell  me.  You  said  once,  back  there  in 
Chicago,  that  there  was  only  one  person  who  really  mattered 
to  you.  I  want  to  know  who  that  one  person  is.  What  he  is. 
Whether  he's  still  the  one  person  who  really  matters.  If  he 
isn't  I'll  take  my  chance.  I'll  make  you  love  me  if  it's  the 
last  thing  I  ever  do  in  the  world." 

Remembering  the  scene  afterward  Rose  was  a  little  sur 
prised  that  she'd  been  able  to  answer  him  as  she  did,  without 
a  hesitation  or  a  stammer,  and  with  a  straight  gaze  that  held 
his  until  she  had  finished. 

"The  only  person  in  the  world,"  she  said,  "who  ever  has 
mattered  to  me,  or  ever  will  matter,  is  my  husband.  I  fell 
in  love  with  him  the  day  I  met  him.  I  was  in  love  with  him 
when  I  left  him.  I'm  in  love  with  him  now.  Everything  I 
do  that's  any  good  is  just  something  he  might  be  proud  of  if 
he  knew  it.  And  every  failure  is  just  something  I  hope  I 
could  make  him  understand  and  not  despise  me  for.  It's 
months  since  I've  seen  him  but  there  isn't  a  day,  there  isn't 
an  hour  in  a  day,  when  I  don't  think  about  him  and — want 
him.  I  don't  know  whether  I'll  ever  see  him  again  but  if  I 
don't  it  won't  make  any  difference  with  that.  That's  why  I 
didn't  see  what  I  might  have  seen  about  you.  It  wasn't  possi 
ble  for  me  to  see.  I'd  never  have  seen  it  if  you  hadn't  told  me 
in  so  many  words,  like  this.  Do  you  see  now?" 

He  turned  away  from  her  with  a  nod  and  put  his  hands 
to  his  face.  She  waited  a  moment  to  see  whether  he  had  any 
thing  else  to  say,  for  the  habit  of  waiting  for  his  dismissal 
was  too  strong  to  be  broken  even  in  a  situation  like  this.  But 
finding  that  he  hadn't  she  rose  and  walked  out  of  the  theater. 

There  was  an  hour  after  she  had  gained  the  haven  of  her 
own  apartment,  when  she  pretty  well  went  to  pieces.  So  this 
was  all,  was  it,  that  she  owed  her  illusory  appearance  of  suc 
cess  to?  The  amorous  desires  of  a  man  old  enough  to  be 
her  father!  Once  more,  she  blissfully  and  ignorantly  unsus 
pecting  all  the  while,  it  was  love  that  had  made  her  world 
go  round.  The  same  long-circuited  sex  attraction  that  James 


FRIENDS  513 

Randolph  long  ago  had  told  her  about.  But  for  that  attrac 
tion  she'd  never  have  got  this  job  in  New  York,  never  have 
had  the  chance  to  design  those  costumes  for  Goldsmith  and 
Block.  Never,  in  all  probability,  have  got  even  that  job  in 
the  chorus  of  The  Girl  Up-stairs.  All  she'd  accomplished  in 
that  bitter  year  since  she  left  Rodney  had  been  to  make  an 
other  man  fall  in  love  with  her! 

But  she  didn't  let  herself  go  like  that  for  long.  The  situa 
tion  was  too  serious  for  the  indulgence  of  an  emotional 
sprawl.  Here  she  was  in  an  apartment  that  cost  her  thirty- 
seven  dollars  a  month.  She'd  got  to  earn  a  minimum  of 
thirty  dollars  a  week  to  keep  on  with  it.  Of  course  she 
couldn't  go  on  working  for  Galbraith.  The  question  was, 
what  could  she  do  ?  Well,  she  could  do  a  good  many  things. 
Whatever  Galbraith's  motives  had  been  in  giving  her  her 
chance,  she  had  taken  that  chance  and  made  the  most  of  it. 
Gertrude  Morse  knew  what  she  could  do.  For  that  matter, 
so  did  Abe  Shuman  himself.  The  thing  to  do  now  was  to  go  to 
bed  and  get  a  night's  sleep  and  confront  the  situation  with  a 
clear  mind  in  the  morning. 

It  was  a  pretty  good  indication  of  the  way  she  had  grown 
during  the  last  year  that  she  was  able  to  conquer  the  shud 
dering  revulsion  that  had  at  first  swept  over  her,  get  herself 
in  hand  again,  eat  a  sandwich  and  drink  a  glass  of  milk,  re 
read  a  half  dozen  chapters  of  Albert  Edwards'  A  Man's  World, 
and  then  put  out  her  light  and  sleep  till  morning. 

It  was  barely  nine  o'clock  when  Galbraith  called  her  up  on 
the  telephone.  She  hadn't  had  her  breakfast  yet  and  had  not 
even  begun  to  think  out  what  the  day's  program  must  be. 

He.  apologized  for  calling  her  so  early.  "I  wanted  to  be 
sure  of  catching  you,"  he  said,  "before  you  did  anything. 
You  haven't  yet,  have  you?  Not  written  to  Shuman  throw 
ing  up  your  job,  or  anything  like  that  ?" 

Even  over  the  telephone  his  manner  was  eloquent  with  re 
lief  when  she  told  him  she  had  not.  "I  want  to  talk  with 
you/'  he  said.  "It's  got  to  be  somewhere  where  we  won't  be 
interrupted."  He  added,  "I  shan't  say  again  what  I  oaid  last 
night.  You'll  find  me  perfectly  reasonable." 


514  THE    REAL   ADVENTUKE 

Somehow  his  voice  carried  entire  conviction.  The  man 
she  visualized  at  the  other  telephone  was  neither  the  dis 
tracted  pleader  she  had  left  last  night,  nor  the  martinet  she 
had  been  working  for  during  the  last  month  here  in  New 
York,  but  the  John  Galbraith  she  had  known  in  Chicago. 

"All  right,"  she  said,  "I  don't  know  any  better  place  than 
here  in  my  apartment,  if  that's  convenient  for  you." 

"Yes,"  he  said,  "that's  all  right.  When  may  I  come?  The 
sooner  the  better  of  course." 

"Can  you  give  me  an  hour  ?"  she  asked,  and  he  said  he  could. 

It  occurred  to  her,  as  the  moment  of  his  arrival  drew  near, 
that  she  might  better  have  thought  twice  before  appointing 
their  meeting  here  in  her  apartment.  Discretion  perhaps 
would  have  suggested  a  more  neutral  rendezvous.  But  she 
didn't  take  this  consideration  very  seriously  and  with  the 
first  real  look  she  got  into  his  face  after  she  had  let  him  in, 
she  dismissed  it  utterly.  They  shook  hands  and  said,  "Good 
morning,"  and  she  asked  him  to  sit  down,  all  as  if  nothing 
had  happened  the  night  before.  But  he  wasted  no  time  in 
getting  to  the  point. 

"There's  one  idea  you'll  have  got,  from  what  I  said  last 
night,  thaf  s  a  mistake  and  that's  got  to  be  set  right  before 
we  go  any  further.  That  is,  that  you  owe  your  position  here, 
as  my  assistant,  to  the  fact  that  I'd  fallen  in  love  with  you. 
That's  not  true.  In  fact,  if  s  the  opposite  of  the  truth.  That 
feeling  of  mine  has  worked  against  you  instead  of  for  you. 
I'll  have  to  explain  that  a  little  to  make  you  understand  it. 
And  if  you  won't  mind  I'll  have  to  talk  pretty  straight." 

She  gave  him  a  nod  of  assent,  but  he  did  not  immediately 
go  on.  It  was  a  reflective  pause,  not  an  embarrassed  one. 

"I've  always  despised,"  he  said,  "a  man  who  mixed  up  his 
love-affairs  with  his  business.  In  my  business,  perhaps, 
there's  a  certain  temptation  to  do  that  and  I've  always  been 
on  guard  against  it.  I've  had  love-affairs,  more  or  less,  all 
along.  But  in  my  vacations.  You  can't  do  decent  honest  work 
when  your  mind's  on  that  sort  of  thing,  and  I  care  more 
about  my  work  than  anything  else. 

"Well,  that  night  in  Chicago,  after  the  opening  of  The  Girl 


PBIBNDS  515 

Up-stwrs,  when  I  took  you  out  to  supper,  I  didn't  know  what 
I  wanted.  That's  the  truth.  I'd  been  fighting  ray  interest  in 
you,  my  personal  interest  that  is,  calling  myself  all  kinds  of 
an  old  fool.  I'd  never  had  a  thing  get  me  like  that  before 
and  I  didn't  know  what  to  make  of  it.  Well,  the  business  was 
over,  of  course.  I  was  entitled  to  a  little  vacation.  I  sup 
pose,  that  night,  if  you'd  shown  the  least  sense  of  how  I  felt, 
even  if  it  was  just  by  seeming  frightened,  I  might  have  flared 
up  and  made  love  to  you.  But  you  didn't  see  it  at  all.  You 
had  some  sort  of — fence  around  you  that  held  me  off.  And 
for  a  while  you  even  made  me  forget  that  I  was  in  love  with 
you.  Forget  that  you  were  anything  but  the  cleverest  person 
I  had  known  at  catching  my  ideas  and  putting  them  over.  I 
saw  how  enormously  valuable  you'd  be  to  me,  in  this  job  you've 
got  now,  and  I  offered  it  to  you. 

"And  then,  all  in  a  wave  the  other  feeling  came  back.  On 
my  way  to  New  York  I  decided  that  as  long  as  I  felt  like  that 
I'd  have  nothing  more  to  do  with  you.  A  man  couldn't  pos 
sibly  do  any  decent  work  with  a  woman  he  was  in-  love  with, 
either  after  he'd  got  her  or  while  he  was  trying  to  get  her. 
That's  why  you  didn't  hear  from  me  within  a  month  after  I'd 
got  back  to  New  York.  But  as  time  went  on  I  forgot  how 
strong  my  feeling  had  been.  I  decided  I'd  got  over  it.  I'd 
been  looking  for  some  one  else  to  take  the  place  I'd  designed 
for  you  and  I  couldn't  find  anybody. 

"I  might  have  got  a  man,  but  I  didn't  want  a  man,  because 
if  he  were  clever  enough  to  be  any  good  he'd  be  out  after  my 
job  from  the  very  first  day.  It  would  suit  Abe  Shuman  down 
to  the  ground  to  have  me  teach  a  man  all  I  know  in  two  years 
and  then  put  him  in  my  place  at  half  my  pay.  As  for  women, 
well,  I've  never  seen  a  woman  yet  with  just  your  combination 
of  qualities,  your  drive  and  your  knack.  So  I  persuaded 
myself  that  it  would  be  all  right.  That  I  could  get  along 
without  thinking  about  you  the  other  way.  And  I  sent  for 
you. 

"But  the  minute  I  saxy  you  I  knew  I'd  have  to  look  out. 
I've  tried  to;  you  know  that.  I've  been  treating  you  like 
a  sweep  since  you've  been  down  here.  I  didn't  mean  to  but 


516  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

I  couldn't  help  it.  I  was  in  such  a  rage  with  myself  for  go 
ing  on  like  a  sentimental  fool  about  you.  And  the  way  you 
took  it,  always  good-humored  and  never  afraid,  made  me  all 
the  more  ashamed  of  myself  and  all  the  more  in  love  with 
you.  And  so  last  night  I  burst.  In  a  way  I'm  glad  I  did.  I 
think  perhaps  it  will  clear  the  air.  But  I'll  come  to  that 
later.  I  want  to  know  now  whether  you're  convinced  that  what 
I  said  is  true.  That  the  fact  that  I  fell  in  love  with  you  has 
been  against  you  and  not  in  your  favor." 

"Yes,"  Rose  said,  "I'm  convinced  of  that  and  I  want  to 
thank  you  for  telling  me.  Because  the  other  feeling  was 
pretty— discouraging." 

"All  right,"  he  said  with  a  nod,  "that's  understood.  Now, 
here's  my  proposition.  That  you  go  on  working  for  me  exactly 
as  if  nothing  had  happened." 

"Oh,  but  that's  impossible!"  she  said,  and  when  he  put  in 
"Why  is  it  ?"  she  told  him  he  had  just  said  so  himself.  That 
it  was  impossible  for  a  man  to  do  decent  work  with  a  woman 
he  was  in  love  with. 

"That's  what  I  thought  last  night  when  I  blew  up,"  he  ad 
mitted,  "but  I've  got  things  a  bit  straighter  since.  In  the 
first  place,  we  have  been  doing  decent  work  all  this  last  month. 
"We've  been  doing,  between  us,  the  work  of  two  high-priced 
directors." 

She  said,  "Yes,  but  I  didn't  know     ..." 

"Understanding's  better  than  ignorance,"  he  interrupted, 
"any  time.  Between  people  of  sense,  that  is.  "We'd  get  on 
better  together,  not  worse.  Look  at  us  now.  We're  talking 
together  sensibly  enough,  aren't  we  ?  And  we're  here  in  your 
sitting-room,  talking  about  the  fact  that  I  fell  in  love  with 
you.  Couldn't  we  talk  just  as  sensibly  in  the  theater,  about 
whether  a  song  or  number  was  in  the  right  place  or  not  ?  Of 
course  we  could." 

The  truth  of  this  argument  rather  stumped  Rose.  It 
didn't  seem  reasonable,  but  it  was  true.  Instead  of  embar 
rassing  and  distressing  her,  this  talk  with  Galbraith  was  doing 
her  good,  restoring  her  confidence.  The  air  between  them 
was  easier  to  breathe  than  it  had  been  for  weeks. 


FKIEKDS 

"You  seem  different  this  morning,  somehow,"  she  said. 

"Why,"  he  told  her,  "I  am  different.  Permanently  differ 
ent  toward  you.  I  am  convinced  of  it.  I  don't  pretend  to 
understand  it  myself,  but  somehow — I'm  relieved.  For  one 
thing,  I  never  wanted  to  fall  in  love  with  you.  It  was  quite 
against  my  will  that  I  did  it.  And  then  I've  always  been  tor 
tured  with  curiosity  about  you.  I've  wondered.  Were  you 
as  unconscious  of  me  as  you  seemed?  Was  it  possible  that 
you  didn't  know.  And  if  you  did  know,  was  it  possible  that 
you  were — waiting?  That  it  only  needed  a  word  of  mine  to 
put  everything  between  us  on  a  different  basis?  I  couldn't 
get  rid  of  that  idea.  It  kept  nagging  at  me.  But  after  what 
you  told  me  last  night — and  you  certainly  told  it  straight — 
that  idea's  exploded.  What  you  said  explains  everything 
about  you.  I  know  now  that  I  haven't  a  chance  in  the  world. 
From  now  on,  I  imagine,  I'll  be  able  to  treat  you  like  a  human 
being.  Well,  are  you  willing  to  try  it  ?" 

Up  to  now  they'd  been  sitting  quietly  in  their  two  chairs 
with  most  of  the  width  of  the  room  between  them.  But  at 
this  last  question  of  his  she  got  up  and  walked  over  to  the 
window. 

"I  don't  know/'  she  said  at  last.  "It  seems  dangerous, 
somehow ;  like  courting  trouble.  I  know  ..."  She  hesi 
tated,  but  then  decided  to  say  what  was  in  her  mind.  "I 
know  how  terribly  strong  those  feelings  are  and  I've  found 
out  how  little  they've  got  to  do  with  what  it's  so  easy  to  decide 
is  reasonable."  Now  she  turned  and  faced  him. 

"Don't  you  think  it  would  be  more  sensible  for  me  to  find 
another  job  ?  So  that  we  could — well,  take  a  fresh  start  ?" 

"Child,"  he  said,  "don't  you  know  there's  no  such  thing  in 
the  world  as  a  fresh  start?  Or  a  new  leaf?  That's  a  com 
fortable  delusion  for  cowards.  The  situation's  in  a  mess,  is 
it?  All  right,  run  away.  Begin  again  with  a  clean  slate. 
But  the  first  thing  written  down  on  that  slate  is  that  you've 
just  run  away.  Besides,  suppose  you  do  get  another  job, 
working,  say,  for  another  director.  How  do  you  know  that 
he  won't  fall  in  love  with  you  ?" 

That  last  sentence  went  by  unheard.     She  was  staring  at 


518  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

him,  almost  in  consternation.  "That's  true,"  she  said. 
"Thai's  perfectly  true.  That  about  running  away.  I — I 
never  thought  of  it  before/'  She  went  back  to  her  chair  and 
dropped  into  it  rather  limply.  She  sat  there  through  a  long 
silence,  still  thinking  over  his  words  and  apparently  almost 
frightened  over  her  own  implications  from  them. 

At  last  he  said,  "You've  no  cause  for  worry  over  that,  I 
should  think.  I  don't  believe  you've  ever  run  away  from  any 
thing  yet." 

"I  don't  know,"  she  answered  thoughtfully.  "I  don't 
know  whether  I  did  or  not." 

"Well,"  he  came  out  at  last,  getting  to  his  feet,  "how  about 
it  ?  What  shall  we  do  this  time  ?  Shall  we  tackle  the  situa 
tion  and  try  to  make  the  best  of  it,  or  .  .  .  " 

"Yes,  that's  what  we'll  do,"  she  said.  "And,  well,  I'm 
much  obliged  to  you  for  putting  me  right." 

"I  made  all  the  trouble  in  the  first  place,"  said  Galbraith, 
with  a  rueful  sort  of  grin.  "It  was  up  to  me  to  think  of 
something." 

And  after  the  elevator  she'd  escorted  him  to  had  carried  him 
down,  she  stood  there  in  the  hallway  smiling,  with  the  glow 
of  a  quite  new  friendliness  for  him  warming  her  heart. 

It  was  natural,  of  course,  that  the  relation  between  them 
after  that  day  should  not  prove  quite  so  simple  and  manage 
able  a  thing  as  it  had  looked  that  morning.  There  were 
breathless  days  when  the  storm  visibly  hung  in  the  sky ;  there 
were  strained,  stiff,  self-conscious  moments  of  rigidly  en 
forced  politeness.  Things  got  said  despite  his  resolute  re 
pression  that  had,  as  resolutely,  to  be  ignored. 

But  in  the  intervals  of  these  failures  there  emerged,  and 
endured  unbroken  for  longer  periods,  the  new  thing  they 
sought — genuine  friendliness,  partnership. 

It  was  just  after  Christmas  that  Abe  Shuman  took  her 
away  from  him  and  put  her  to  work  exclusively  on  costumes. 
And  the  swift  sequence  of  events  within  a  month  thereafter 
launched  her  in  an  independent  business ;  the  new  partnership 
with  Alice  Perosini,  with  the  details  of  which,  through  Jimmy 
Wallace,  you  are  already  sufficiently  acquainted.  By  the  time 


FRIENDS  519 

that  happened  the  friendship  had  gone  so  far  that  Rose's 
chief  reluctance  in  making  the  change  sprang  from  a  fear  that 
the  change  would  interrupt  it. 

But  the  thing  worked  the  other  way.  Released  from  the 
compulsory  relation  of  employer  and  employee,  they  frankly 
sought  each  other  as  friends,  and  found  that  they  got  more 
out  of  a  half-hour  together  over  a  hasty  lunch  than  a  whole 
day's  struggle  over  a  common  task  had  given  them. 

There  were  long  stretches  of  days,  of  course,  when  they 
saw  nothing  of  each  other,  and  Rose,  so  long  as  she  had  plenty 
to  do,  was  never  conscious  of  missing  him.  She  never,  in  the 
course  of  her  own  day's  work,  made  an  unconscious  reference 
to  him,  as  she  was  always  making  them  to  Rodney.  But  the 
prospect  of  an  empty  Sunday  morning,  for  instance,  was 
always  enormously  brightened  if  he  called  up  to  say  that  it 
was  empty  for  him,  too,  and  shouldn't  they  go  for  a  walk  or 
a  ferry  ride  somewhere. 

He  did  the  greater  part  of  the  talking.  Told  her,  a  good 
deal  to  his  own  surprise,  stories  of  his  early  life  in  London 
— a  chapter  he'd  never  been  willing  to  refer  to,  except  in  the 
vaguest  terms,  to  anybody  else.  He  told  her,  too,  with  more 
and  more  freedom  and  explicitness,  as  he  discovered  how 
straight  and  honest  her  mind  was,  how  eager  it  was  for  facts 
instead  of  for  sentimental  refractions  of  them,  about  certain 
emotional  adventures  of  his  as  he  was  emerging  into  man 
hood,  and  of  the  marks  they  had  left  on  him. 

All  told,  she  learned  more  about  men,  as  such,  from  him 
than  ever  she  had  learned,  consciously  at  least,  from  Rodney. 
She'd  never  been  able  to  regard  her  husband  as  a  specimen. 
He  was  Rodney,  sui  generis,  and  it  had  never  occurred  to  her 
either  to  generalize  from  him  to  other  men,  or  to  explain  any 
of  the  facts  she  had  noted  about  him,  on  the  mere  ground  of 
his  masculinity.  She  began  doing  that  now  a  little,  and  the 
exercise  opened  her  eyes. 

In  many  ways  Galbraith  and  her  husband  were  a  good  deal 
alike.  Both  were  rough,  direct,  a  little  remorseless,  and  there 
was  in  both  of  them,  right  alongside  the  best  and  finest  and 
clearest  things  they  had,  an  unaccountable  vein  of  childish- 


520  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

ness.  She'd  never  been  willing  to  call  it  by  tbat  name  in 
Rodney.  But  when  she  saw  it  in  Galbraith,  too,  she  won 
dered.  Was  that  just  the  man  of  it  ?  Were  they  all  like  that ; 
at  least  all  the  best  of  them  ?  Did  a  man,  as  long  as  he  lived, 
need  somebody  in  the  role  of — mother  ?  The  thought  all  but 
suffocated  her. 

She  did  not  return  Galbraith's  confidences  with  any  detailed 
account  of  her  own  life,  and  the  one  great  emotional  experi 
ence  of  it  that  seemed  to  have  absorbed  all  the  rest  and  drawn 
it  up  into  itself.  But  she  had  a  comforting  sense  that,  scanty 
as  was  the  framework  of  facts  he  had  to  go  on,  he  knew, 
somehow,  all  about  it;  all  the  essentials  of  it;  knew  infinitely 
more  about  her  than  Alice  Perosini  did,  although  from  time 
to  time  she  had  told  Alice  a  good  deal. 

Spring  came  on  them  with  a  rush  that  year;  swept  a  vivid 
flush  of  green  over  the  parks  and  squares,  all  in  a  day ;  pumped 
the  sap  up  madly  into  the  little  buds,  so  that  they  could 
hardly  swell  fast  enough,  and  burst  at  last  into  a  perfectly 
riotous  fanfare  through  the  shrubberies.  It  pumped  blood, 
too,  as  well  as  sap,  and  made  hearts  flutter  to  strange  irregu 
lar  rhythms  with  the  languorous  insolence  of  its  perfumes,  and 
the  soft  caressing  pressures  of  its  south  wind. 

It  worried  Rose  nearly  mad.  She  was  bound  to  have  gone 
slack  anyway;  to  have  experienced  the  well-earned,  honest 
lassitude  of  a  finished  struggle  and  an  achieved  victory.  Dane 
&  Company  had  any  amount  of  work  in  sight,  to  be  sure — a 
success  of  such  triumphant  proportions  as  they  had  had  with 
Come  On  In,  made  that  inevitable — but  it  would  be  months 
before  any  of  the  new  work  was  wanted. 

Alice,  who  could  see  plainly  enough  that  something  was 
the  matter,  kept  urging  Rose  to  run  away  somewhere  for  a 
long  vacation.  Why  not,  if  it  came  to  that,  put  in  a  few 
weeks  in  London  and  Paris?  She  was  almost  sure  to  pick 
up  some  valuable  ideas  over  there.  Rose  declined  that  sug 
gestion  almost  sharply.  If  she'd  had  any  practical  training 
as  a  nurse,  she'd  go  over  to  Paris  and  stay,  but  to  use  that 
magnificently  courageous  tragic  city  as  a  source  of  ideas  for 
a  Shuman  revue  was  out  of  the  question.  As  for  the  quiet 


FRIENDS  521 

place  in  the  Virginia  mountain?,  which  Alice  had  suggested 
as  an  alternative,  Rose  would  die  of  ennui  there  within  three 
days.  The  only  thing  to  do  was  to  stick  to  her  routine  as  well 
as  she  could,  and  worry  along. 

These  weren't  reasons  that  she  gave  Alice,  they  were  ex 
cuses.  The  reason,  which  she  tried  to  avoid  stating,  even  to 
herself,  was  that  she  couldn't  bear  the  thought  of  going  one 
step  farther  away  from  Rodney  than  she  was  already. 

A  letter  from  him  was  always  in  the  first  Saturday  morn 
ing  delivery  and  she  never  left  for  her  atelier  till  she  got  it. 
She  had  perceived,  what  he  had  not,  the  steadily  growing 
friendliness  of  these  letters.  It  wasn't  a  made-up  thing, 
either.  He  was  not  telling  her  things  because  he  thought 
she'd  like  to  be  told,  but  because  it  had  insensibly  become  a 
need  of  his  to  tell  her. 

A  year  ago  those  letters  would  have  made  her  wildly  happy ; 
would  have  filled  her  with  the  confidence  that  the  end  she 
sought  was  in  sight  at  last.  ISTow  they  drove  her  half  mad 
with  disappointment.  She  never  opened  one  of  those  dearly 
familiar  envelopes  without  the  irrepressible  hope  that  it  con 
tained  a  love-letter;  a  passionate  demand  that  she  come  back 
to  him;  leave  all  she  had  and  come  back  to  him;  his  woman 
to  her  man.  And  her  disappointment  and  inconsistency  be 
wildered  her. 

Her  two  chance  encounters,  first  with  Jimmy  Wallace  in 
the  theater,  and  later  with  James  Randolph,  made  her  rest 
lessness  more  nearly  unendurable.  The  thought  that  they 
were  going  back  to  Chicago  and  would,  no  doubt,  within  a 
few  days  after  their  talks  with  her,  see  and  talk  with  him,  was 
like  the  cup  of  Tantalus.  And  if  she  could  encounter  them 
by  chance,  like  that,  why  mightn't  she  encounter  him  ?  Why 
mightn't  he  come  to  New  York  on  business?  She  never 
walked  anywhere,  nowadays,  without  watching  for  him. 

She  didn't  yield,  passively,  to  these  thoughts  and  feelings. 
She  fought  them  relentlessly,  methodically.  She  went  to  a 
women's  gymnasium  every  evening,  threw  a  medicine  ball 
around  for  a  while,  and  then  played  a  hard  game  of  squash,  in 
the  sometimes  successful  attempt  to  get  tired  enough  so  that 


522  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

she'd  have  to  sleep.  Also  she  tried  riding  in  the  park,  morn 
ings,  but  that  didn't  work  so  well,  and  she  gave  it  up. 

There  carne  a  Saturday  morning,  toward  the  end  of  Ma}r, 
which  brought  no  letter  from  Rodney,  and  she  stayed  in  all 
day,  from  one  delivery  to  the  next,  waiting  for  it.  She  tried 
to  disguise  her  excitement  over  its  failure  to  arrive,  as  a  fear 
lest  something  might  have  gone  wrong  with  him  or  with  the 
twins,  but  did  not  succeed.  If  an}rthing  had  gone  wrong  she 
knew  she'd  have  heard.  The  thing  that  kept  clutching  at  her 
heart  was  hope.  The  hope  that  the  letter  wouldn't  come  at 
all;  that  there'd  be  a  telephone  call  instead — and  Rodney's 
voice. 

The  telephone  did  ring  just  before  noon,  but  the  voice  was 
Galbraith's.  He  wanted  to  know  if  she  wouldn't  come  over 
to  his  Long  Island  farm  the  following  morning  and  spend 
the  day. 

She  had  visited  the  place  two  or  three  times  and  had  always 
enjoyed  it  immensely  there.  It  wasn't  much  of  a  farm,  but 
there  was  a  delightful  old  Revolutionary  farmhouse  on  it, 
with  ceilings  seven  feet  high  and  casement  windows,  and  the 
floors  of  all  the  rooms  on  different  levels;  and  Galbraith, 
there,  was  always  quite  at  his  best.  His  sister  and  her  hus 
band,  whom  he  had  brought  over  from  England  when  ho 
bought  the  place,  ran  it  for  him.  They  were  the  simplest  sort 
of  peasant  people  who  had  hardly  stirred  from  their  little 
Surrey  hamlet  until  that  meteoric  brother  of  theirs  had  sum 
moned  them  on  their  breath-taking  voyage  to  America,  and 
for  whom  now,  on  this  little  Long  Island  farm,  New  York 
might  have  been  almost  as  far  away  as  London.  Mrs.  Flax- 
man  did  all  the  work  of  the  house  and  farmyard  without  the 
aid  of  a  servant,  and  her  husband  raised  vegetables  for  the 
New  York  market. 

What  the  pair  really  thought  of  the  life  John  Galbraith 
led,  or  of  the  guests  he  sometimes  brought  out  for  week-end 
visits,  no  one  knew.  But  the  pleasant  sort  of  homely  hos 
pitality  one  always  found  there  was  extremely  attractive  to 
Rose,  and  with  Rodney's  regular  Saturday  letter  at  hand 
she'd  have  accepted  the  invitation  eagerly.  As  it  was,  she 


FRIENDS  523 

answered  almost  shortly  that  she  couldn't  come.  Then,  con 
trite,  she  hastened  to  dilute  her  refusal  with  an  elaboration 
of  regrets  and  hastily  contrived  reasons. 

"All  right,"  he  said  good-humoredly,  "I  shan't  ask  any  one 
else,  but  if  you  happen  to  change  your  mind  call  me  on  the 
phone  in  the  morning.  Tell  me  what  train  you're  coming 
down  on  and  I'll  meet  you." 

She  didn't  expect  to  change  her  mind,  but  a  phonograph  did 
it  for  her.  This  instrument  was  domesticated  across  the 
court  somewhere — she  had  never  bothered  to  discover  just 
which  pair  of  windows  the  sound  of  it  issued  from — and  it 
was  addicted  to  fox-trots,  comic  recitations  in  negro  dialect, 
and  the  melodies  of  Mr.  Irving  Berlin.  It  was  jolly  and  com 
panionable  and  Eose  regarded  it  as  a  friend.  But  on  this 
Saturday  night,  perversely  enough,  perhaps  because  its  master 
was  in  Pittsburgh  on  a  business  trip  and  hadn't  come  home 
as  expected,  the  thing  turned  sentimental.  It  sang  I'm  on 
My  Way  to  Mandalay,  under  the  impression  that  Mandalay 
was  an  island  somewhere.  It  played  The  Rosary,  done  as  a 
solo  on  the  cornet;  and  over  and  over  again  it  sang,  with  the 
thickest,  sirupiest  sentiment  that  John  McCormack  at  his 
best  is  capable  of, 

"Just  a  little  love,  a  li — ttle  kiss, 
Just  an  hour  that  holds  a  world  of  bliss, 
Eyes  that  tremble  like  the  stars  above  me, 
And  the  little  word  that  says  you  love  me." 

It  was  a  song  that  had  tormented  Eose  before  with  the 
abysmal  fatuity  of  its  phrases,  its  silly  sloppy  melody,  and 
yet — this  was  the  infuriating  thing — the  way  it  had  of  get 
ting  into  her,  somehow,  reaching  bare  nerves  and  setting  them 
all  aquiver. 

To-night  it  broke  her  down.  She  closed  the  windows,  de 
spite  the  sultriness  of  the  night,  but  the  tune,  having  once 
got  in,  couldn't  be  shut  out.  Whether  she  heard  it  or  only 
fancied  she  did,  didn't  matter.  The  words  bored  their  wav 
into  her  brain. 


524  THE   EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

"Just  a  little  love,  a  little  kiss, 

I  would  give  you  all  my  life  for  this, 

As  I  hold  you  fast  and  bend  above  you    .    .    . " 

It  was  a  white  night  for  Eose.  The  morning  sun  had  been 
streaming  into  her  bedroom  for  an  hour  before  she  finally 
fell  asleep.  And  at  nine  o'clock,  when  she  wakened,  she  heard 
the  phonograph  going  again.  It  was  now  on  its  way  to  Man- 
dalay,  but  John  McCormack  was  no  doubt  waiting  in  the 
background.  She  went  to  the  telephone  and  called  up  Gal- 
braith,  telling  him  she'd  come  by  the  first  train  she  could  get. 

He  met  her  with  a  dog-cart  and  a  fat  pony,  and  when  they 
had  jogged  their  way  to  their  destination  they  spent  what  was 
left  of  the  morning  looking  over  the  farm.  Then  there  was 
a  midday  farm  dinner  that  Eose  astonished  herself  by  dealing 
with  as  it  deserved  and  by  feeling  sleepy  at  the  conclusion  of. 
Galbraith  caught  her  biting  down  a  yawn  and  packed  her  off 
to  the  big  Gloucester  swing  in  the  veranda,  the  one  addition 
he'd  built  on  the  place,  for  a  nap;  and  obediently  she  did  as 
he  bade  her. 

Coming  into  the  veranda  about  four  o'clock,  and  finding 
her  awake,  he  suggested  that  they  go  for  a  walk.  She  had 
dressed,  in  anticipation  of  this,  in  a  short  skirt  and  heavy 
walking  boots,  so  they  set  out  across  the  fields.  Two  hours 
later,  having  swung  her  legs  over  a  stone  wall  that  had  a 
comfortably  inviting  flat  top,  she  remained  sitting  there  and 
let  her  gaze  rest,  unfocused,  on  the  pleasant  farm  land  that 
lay  below  them. 

After  a  glance  at  her  he  leaned  back  against  the  wall  at 
her  side  and  began  filling  his  pipe.  She  dropped  her  hand 
on  his  nearer  shoulder.  After  all  these  months  of  friendship 
it  was  the  first  approach  to  a  caress  that  had  passed  between 
them. 

"You're  a  good  friend,"  she  said,  and  then  the  hand  that 
had  rested  on  him  so  lightly  suddenly  gripped  hard.  "And  I 
guess  I  need  one,"  she  ended. 

He  went  on  filling  his  pipe.  "Anything  special  you  need 
one  for  ?"  he  asked  quietly. 


"You're   a  sjood   friend,"   >he   said. 


FKIENDS  525 

She  gave  a  ragged  little  laugh.  "I  guess  not.  Just  some 
body  strong  and  steady  to  hold  on  to  like  this." 

"Well,"  he  said  very  deliberately,  "you  want  to  realize  this : 
You  say  I'm  a  friend  and  I  am,  but  if  there  is  anything  in 
this  friendship  which  can  be  of  use  to  you  you're  entitled  to 
it ;  to  everything  there  is  in  it.  Because  you  made  it." 

"One  person  can't  make  a  friendship,"  she  said.  "Even 
two  people  can't.  It's  got  to — grow  out  of  them  somehow." 

He  assented  with  a  nod.  "But  in  this  case  who  gave  it  a 
chance  to  grow?  Where  would  it  have  been  if  I'd  had  my 
way  ?  If  you  hadn't  pulled  me  up  and  set  me  straight  ?" 

"For  that  matter,"  she  said,  "where  would  it  have  been  if  I 
had  had  mine  ?  If  I'd  run  away  and  tried  for  a  fresh  start,  as 
I'd  have  done  if  jou  hadn't  set  me  right  ?" 

"Make  it  so,"  he  said.  "Say  we've  equal  rights  in  it.  Still 
you  needn't  worry  about  my  not  getting  my  share  of  the 
benefits." 

"You  are  content  with  it,  aren't  you  ?  Like  this  ?  I  haven't 
— cheated  ?  Used  you  ?  It's  easy  for  a  woman  to  do  that,  I 
think.  It  isn't  .  .  .  ?"  She  asked  that  last  question  by 
taking  her  hand  off  his  shoulder. 

"No,  put  it  back,"  he  said.  "It's  all  right."  He  smoked 
in  silence  for  a  minute;  then  went  on.  "Why,  'content'  is 
hardly  the  word  for  it.  When  I  think  what  it  was  I  wanted 
and  what  you've  given  me  instead  .  .  .  !  It  wasn't  self- 
denial  or  any  other  high  moral  principle  that  kept  me  from 
flaring  up  when  you  took  hold  of  me  just  now.  It's  because 
I've  got  a  better  thing.  Something  I  wouldn't  trade  for  all 
the  love  in  the  world.  'Content' !" 

"I'd  like  to  believe  it  was  a  better  thing,"  she  said;  "but 
I'm  afraid  I  can't." 

"Neither  could  I  when  I  was — how  old  are  you? — twenty- 
four.  Perhaps  when  you're  fifty-one  you  can." 

"I  suppose  so,"  she  said  absently.  "Perhaps  if  it  were  a 
question  of  choosing  between  a  love  that  hadn't  any  friend 
ship  in  it  and  a  friendship  .  .  .  But  it  can't  be  like  that ! 
— Can  it?  Can't  one  have  both ?  Can't  a  man — love  a  woman 
and  be  her  friend  and  partner  all  at  the  same  time  ?" 


526  THE    HEAL   ADVENTURE 

"I  can't  answer  for  every  man/'  lie  said  reflectively.  "There 
are  all  kinds  of  men.  And  that's  not  mentioning  the  queers, 
who  aren't  real  men  at  all.  Take  a  dozen  sound,  normal, 
healthy  men  and  if  you  could  find  out  the  truth  about  them, 
which  it  would  be  pretty  hard  to  do,  you'd  find  immense  dif 
ferences  in  their  wants,  habits,  feelings;  in  the  way  things 
look  them.  But  I've  a  notion  that  nine  out  of  the  dozen,  if 
you  could  get  down  to  the  actual  bedrock  facts  about  them, 
would  own  up  that  if  they  were  in  love  with  a  woman — really, 
you  know,  all  the  way — they  wouldn't  want  her  for  a  partner, 
and  wouldn't  be  able  to  see  her  as  a  friend.  That's  just  a 
guess,  of  course.  But  there's  one  thing  I  know,  and  that  is 
that  I  couldn't." 

She  gave  a  little  shiver.  "Oh,  what  a  mess  it  is  !"  she  said. 
"What  a  perfectly  hopeless  blunder  it  is !"  She  slid  down 
from  the  wall.  "Come;  let's  walk." 

He  fell  in  beside  her  and  they  tramped  sturdily  along  for 
a  while  in  silence.  At  last  she  said,  "Can  you  tell  me  why? 
Suppose  there  hadn't  been  any  one  else  with  me;  suppose  I'd 
felt  toward  you  the  way  you  did  toward  me,  then;  why 
couldn't  you  have  gone  on  being  my  friend  and  partner  as 
well  as  my  lover?  You'd  have  known  I  was  worth  it;  have 
known  I  understood  the  things  you  were  interested  in  and — 
yes,  and  was  able  to  help  you  to  work  them  out.  Why  would 
all  that  have  had  to  go  ?" 

"Oh,  I  don't  know  that  I  can  explain  it,"  he  said.  "But  I 
don't  think  I'd  call  it  a  blunder  that  a  strip  of  spring  steel 
can't  bend  in  your  fingers  like  copper  and  still  go  on  being  a 
spring.  You  see,  a  man  wants  his  work  and  then  he  wants 
something  that  isn't  his  work;  that's  altogether  apart  from 
his  work;  doesn't  remind  him  of  it.  Love's  about  as  far 
away  as  anything  he  can  get.  So  that  the  notion  of  our  work 
ing  ourselves  half  to  death  over  the  same  job,  and  then  going 
home  together  ..." 

"Yes,"  she  admitted.  "I  can  see  that.  But  that  doesn't 
cover  friendship." 

He  owned  that  it  didn't.  "But  when  I'm  in  love  with  a 
woman — this  isn't  a  fact  I'm  proud  of,  but  it's  true — I'm 


FEIEKDS  527 

jealous  of  her.  Not  of  other  men  alone,  though  I'm  that,  too, 
but  jealous  of  everything.  I  want  to  he  all  around  her.  I 
want  to  be  everything  to  her.  I  want  her  to  think  there's 
nobody  like  me;  that  nobody  else  could  be  right  and  I  be 
wrong.  And  I  want  to  be  able  to  think  the  same  of  her.  I 
want  her  to  hide,  from  me,  the  tilings  about  herself  that  I 
wouldn't  like.  When  I  ask  her  what  she  thinks  about  some 
thing,  I  want  her  to  say — what  I  want  her  to  think.  I  know 
what  I  want  her  to  think,  and  if  she  doesn't  say  it  she  hurts 
my  feelings." 

He  thought  it  over  a  bit  longer  and  then  went  on.  "No, 
I've  been  in  love  with  women  I  could  suspect  of  anything. 
Women  I  thought  were  lying  to  me,  cheating  me ;  women  I've 
hated;  women  I've  known  hated  me.  But  I've  never  been  in 
love  with  a  woman  who  was  my  friend.  I'd  never  figured  it 
out  before,  but  it's  so." 

In  the  process  of  figuring  it  out  he'd  more  or  less  forgotten 
Rose.  He  had  been  tramping  along  communing  with  his 
pipe;  thinking  aloud.  If  he'd  been  watching  her  face  he 
wouldn't  have  gone  so  far. 

"Well,  if  it's  like  that,"  she  said,  and  the  quality  of  her 
voice  drew  his  full  attention  instantly — "if  love  has  to  be  like 
that,  then  the  game  doesn't  seem  worth  going  on  with.  You 
can't  live  with  it,  and  you  can't  live — without  it."  Her  voice 
dropped  a  little,  but  gained  in  intensity.  "At  least  I  can't. 
I  don't  believe  I  can."  She  stopped  and  faced  him.  "What 
can  one  do  ?"  she  demanded.  "Wait,  I  suppose  you'll  say,  till 
you're  fifty.  Well,  you're  fifty,  and  the  thing  can  still  torment 
you ;  spring  on  you  when  you  aren't  looking ;  twist  you  about." 
She  turned  away  with  a  despairing  gesture  and  stood  gazing 
out,  tear-blinded,  over  the  little  valley  the  hilltop  they  had 
reached  commanded. 

"You  want  to  remember  this,"  he  said  at  last.  "I've  been 
talking  about  myself.  I  haven't  even  pretended  to  guess  for 
more  than  nine  of  those  twelve  men.  That  leaves  three  who 
are,  I  am  pretty  sure,  different.  I  might  have  been  different 
myself,  a  little  anyway,  if  I'd  got  a  different  sort  of  start.  If 
my  first  love-affair  had  been  an  altogether  different  thing.  If 


528  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

it  had  been  the  kind  that  gave  me  a  home  and  kids.  So  you 
don't  want  to  take  what  I've  said  for  anything  more  than  just 
the  truth  about  me.  And  I'm  not,  thank  God,  a  fair  sample." 

ITe  stood  behind  her,  miserably  helpless  to  say  or  do  any 
thing  to  comfort  her.  An  instinct  told  him  she  didn't  want 
his  hands  on  her  just  then,  and  he  couldn't  unsay  the  things 
he  had  told  her  any  further  than  he  had  already. 

Presently  she  turned  back  to  him,  slid  her  hand  inside  his 
arm,  and  started  down  the  road  with  him.  "My  love-affair 
brought  me  a  home  and — kids,"  she  said.  "There  are  two  of 
them — twins — a  year  and  a  half  old  now;  and  I  went  off  and 
left  them ;  left  him.  And  all  I  did  it  for  was  to  make  myself 
over,  into  somebody  he  could  be  friends  with,  instead  of  just 
— as  I  said  then — his  mistress.  I'd  never  known  a  woman 
then  who  was  a  man's  mistress,  really,  and  I  didn't  see  why 
he  should  be  so  angry  over  my  using  the  word.  I  thought  it 
was  fair  enough.  And  the  day  I  left  his  house  I  came  to  you 
and  got  a  job  in  the  chorus  in  Tlie  Girl  Up-stairs.  I  tfiought 
that  by  earning  my  own  way,  building  a  life  that  he  didn't 
— surround,  as  you  sa}r — I  could  win  his  friendship.  And 
have  his  love  besides.  I  don't  suppose  you  would  have  be 
lieved  there  could  be  such  a  fool  in  the  world  as  I  was  to  do 
that." 

He  took  a  while  digesting  this  truly  amazing  statement  of 
hers,  a  half-mile  perhaps  of  steady  silent  tramping.  But  at 
last  he  said,  "No,  I  wouldn't  call  you  a  fool.  I  call  a  fool  a 
person  who  thinks  he  can  get  something  for  nothing.  You 
didn't  think  that.  You  were  willing  to  pay — a  heavy  price 
it  must  have  been,  too — for  what  you  wanted.  And  I've  an 
idea,  you  know,  that  you  never  really  pay  without  getting 
something;  though  you  don't  always  get  what  you  expect. 
You've  got  something  now.  A  knowledge  of  what  you  can 
do ;  of  what  you  are  worth ;  and  I  don't  believe  you'd  trade  it 
for  what  you  had  the  day  before  you  came  to  me  for  a  job." 

"I  don't  know,"  she  said  raggedly.  "Perhaps  ..."  A 
sob  clutched  at  her  throat  and  she  did  not  try  to  conclude  the 
sentence. 

"As  to  whether  you  did  right  or  wrong  in  leaving  him,"  he 


FRIENDS  529 

went  on,  "you've  got  to  figure  it  this  way.  It  isn't  fair  to 
say,  'Knowing  what  I  know  now  and  being  what  I  am  now, 
but  in  the  situation  I  was  in  then,  I'd  have  done  differently.' 
The  thing  you've  got  to  take  into  account  is,  being  what  you 
were  then,  suppose  you  hadn't  gone  ?  You  thought  then  that 
you  were  just  his  mistress,  not  knowing  what  a  real  mistress 
was  like ;  and  you  thought  that  by  going  away  you  could  make 
yourself  his  friend.  You  thought  that  was  your  great  chance. 
Well,  you  couldn't  have  stayed  without  feeling  that  you  had 
thrown  away  your  chance;  without  knowing  that  you'd  had 
your  big  thing  to  do  and  had  been  afraid  to  do  it.  And  that 
knowledge  would  have  gone  a  long  way  toward  making  you 
the  thing  you  thought  you  were. 

"Well,  you  did  your  big  thing.  And  a  person  who's  o*bne 
that  has  stayed  alive  anyway;  and  he  knows  that  when  his 
next  big  thing  comes  along  he'll  do  that  too.  I  don't  pretend 
that  you'll  always  come  out  right  in  the  end  if  you  do  the 
big  thing,  but  I'm  pretty  sure  of  this;  that  you  never  come 
out  at  all  if  you  refuse  it." 

His  amazement  over  what  she  had  done  increased  as  he 
thought  about  it  and  was  testified  to  every  now  and  then  by 
grunts  and  snorts  and  little  exclamations,  but  he  made  no 
more  articulate  comment. 

There  was  a  seven-thirty  train  she  thought  she  ought  to 
take  back  to  town  and  as  their  walk  had  led  in  that  direction 
they  finished  it  at  the  station,  where  he  waited  with  her  for 
the  train  to  come  in. 

"It's  been  a  good  day,"  she  said.  "I  feel  as  if  vou'd  some 
how  pulled  me  through." 

"And  I,"  he  said,  "feel  like  a  wind-bag.  I've  talked  and 
talked ;  smug  comfortable  preaching." 

"No,  it's  helped,"  she  insisted.  "Or  something  has.  Just 
having  you  there,  perhaps.  I  feel  better,  anyway." 

But  after  she'd  got  her  last  look  at  him  on  the  platform, 
when  the  train  had  carried  her  off,  an  observer,  seeing  the 
way  the  color  faded  out  of  her  face,  and  the  look  in  the  eyes, 
which,  so  wide  open  and  so  unseeing,  stared  straight  ahead, 
would  have  said  that  the  benefit  hadn't  lasted  long.  There 


530  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

was  about  her  the  look  of  somber  terror,  just  verging  on 
panic,  which  you  have  seen  in  a  child's  face  when  he  has  been 
sent  up-stairs  to  bed  alone  in  the  dark. 

Fragments  of  Galbraith's  talk  came  back  to  her.  It  was 
by  ceasing  to  be  her  lover  and  her  partner  that  he  had  become 
her  friend.  Rodney,  it  seemed  from  his  letters,  was  becoming 
her  friend  too.  Was  it  because  he,  too,  had  ceased  to  be  her 
lover?  If  ever  she  stood  face  to  face  with  him  again  would 
she  search  in  vain  for  that  look  of  hunger — of  ages-old 
hunger  and  need — that  she'd  last  seen  when  they  stood  face 
to  face  in  her  little  room  on  Clark  Street  ? 

She  walked  down-town  to  her  apartment  from  the  Perm- 
sylvania  strtion  and,  though  the  natural  effect  of  fatigue  was 
to  quicken  her  pace,  and  though  she  was  indubitably  tired, 
she  walked  slowly;  slowly,  and  still  more  slowly.  She  found 
she  dreaded  going  back  to  that  apartment  of  hers  and  shut 
ting  herself  in  for  the  night,  alone. 

She  found  two  corners  of  white  projecting  from  under  her 
door.  And  when  she'd  unlocked  and  opened  it  she  stooped 
and  picked  them  up,  a  visiting  card  and  a  folded  bit  of  paper. 
She  turned  the  card  over  and  gave  a  little  half-suffocated  cry. 

It  was  Rodne}r's  card  and  on  it  he'd  written,  "Sorry  to  have 
missed  you.  I'll  come  back  at  eight." 

Her  shaking  fingers  fumbled  pitifully  over  the  folds  of  the 
note,  but  she  got  it  open  at  last.  It  was  from  him  too.  It 
read: 

"DEAR  ROSE  : 

This  is  hard  luck.  I  suppose  you're  off  for  a  week-end 
somewhere.  I  want  very  much  to  see  you.  When  you  come 
back  and  have  leisure  for  me,  will  you  call  me  up  ?  I  know 
how  busy  you  are  so  I'll  wait  until  I  hear  from  you. 

RODNEY." 

Her  heart  felt  like  lead  when  she'd  read  it.  Dazedly,  a 
little  giddily,  she  pulled  her  door  shut,  went  into  her  room 
and  sat  down. 

He  was  in  New  York !    He'd  been  to  see  her  this  afternoon 


FRIENDS  531 

— and  left  a  card !  And  the  note  he'd  written  after  his  second 
visit  was  what  Howard  West  might  have  written,  or  any 
other  quite  casual,  slightly  over-polite  acquaintance.  And  it 
was  from  Eodney  to  her ! 

She  couldn't  see  him  if  he  felt  like  that;  couldn't  stand  it 
to  see  him  if  he  felt  like  that !  Bitterness,  contempt,  hatred, 
anything  would  be  easier  to  bear  than  that.  She  was  to  call 
up  his  hotel,  was  she  ?  Well,  she  wouldn't ! 

And  then  suddenly  she  spread  the  note  open  again  and  read 
it  once  more.  Turned  it  over  and  scrutinized  the  reverse 
side  of  the  paper,  and  uttered  a  little  sobbing  laugh.  If  he'd 
been  as  cool,  unmoved,  self-possessed,  as  that  note  had  tried 
to  sound,  would  he  have  forgotten  to  tell  her  at  what  hotel 
she  was  to  call  him  up  ? 

Then,  with  a  gasp,  she  wondered  how  she  could  call  him 
up.  He'd  think  she  knew  where  he  was ;  he'd  wait ;  and  after 
he'd  waited  a  while,  in  default  of  word  from  her,  wouldn't 
he  take  her  silence  for  an  answer  and  go  back  to  Chicago  ? 

She  clenched  her  hands  at  that  and  tried  to  think.  Well, 
the  obvious  thing  to  do  seemed  to  be  the  only  one.  She  must 
try  one  hotel  after  another  until  she  fqund  him.  After  all, 
there  probably  weren't  more  than  a  dozen  to  choose  among. 
It  wouldn't  be  easy  looking  up  numbers  with  everything 
dancing  before  her  eyes  like  this,  but  if  she  took  the  likeliest 
ones  first  she  mightn't  have  to  go  very  far.  And,  indeed,  at 
a  third  attempt  she  found  him. 

When  the  telephone  girl  switched  her  to  the  information 
desk,  and  the  information  clerk  said,  "Mr.  Eodney  Aldrich? 
Just  a  moment,"  and  then ;  "Mr.  Aldrich  is  in  fifteen  naught 
five,"  the  dry  contraction  in  her  throat  made  it  impossible  for 
her  to  speak. 

But  the  switchboard  girl  had  evidently  been  listening  in 
and  plugged  her  through,  because  she  heard  the  throb  of  an 
other  ring,  a  click  of  a  receiver  and  then — then  Eodney's 
voice. 

She  couldn't  answer  his  first  "Hello,"  and  he  said  it  again, 
sharply,  "Hello,  what  is  it  ?" 

And  then  suddenly  her  voice  came  back.     A  voice  that 


532  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

startled  her  with  its  distinctness.  "Hello,  Rodney,"  she  said ; 
"this  is  Rose." 

There  was  a  perfectly  blank  silence  after  that  and  then  the 
crisp  voice  of  an  operator  somewhere — "Waiting?" 

"Yes,"  she  heard  Rodney  say,  "get  off  the  line."  And  then 
to  her.  "I  came  to  see  you  this  afternoon  and  again  to-night." 

"Yes,  I  know,"  she  said.  "I  just  this  minute  got  in.  Can't 
you  come  back  again  now  ?" 

How  in  the  world,  she  had  wondered,  could  she  manage 
her  voice  like  that !  From  the  way  it  sounded  she  might  have 
been  speaking  to  Alice  Perosini;  and  yet  her  shaking  hand 
could  hardly  hold  the  receiver.  She  heard  him  sa}r : 

"It's  pretty  late,  isn't  it?  I  don't  want  to  ...  You'll 
be  tired  and  .  .  ." 

"It's  not  too  late  for  me,"  she  said,  "only  you  might  come 
straight  along  before  it  gets'  any  later." 

She  managed  to  wait  until  she  heard  him  say,  "All  right," 
before  she  hung  up  the  receiver.  Then  a  big  racking  sob, 
not  to  be  denied  any  longer,  pounced  on  her  and  shook  her. 


CHAPTER  IV 

COULEUR-DE-EOSE 

THE  fact  that  the  length  of  time  it  would  take  a  taxi  to 
bring  him  down  from  his  hotel  to  her  apartment  was  not 
enough  to  decide  anything  in,  plan  anything  in,  was  no  more 
than  enough,  indeed,  to  give  her  a  chance  to  stop  crying  and 
wash  her  face,  was  a  saving  factor  in  the  situation. 

In  the  back  of  her  mind,  as  with  a  hairpin  or  two  she 
righted  her  hair  and  decided,  glancing  down  over  herself, 
against  attempting  to  change  even  her  tumbled  blouse  or  her 
dusty  boots,  was  an  echoing  consciousness  of  something  Gal- 
braith  had  said  that  afternoon — "And  you  know  when  your 
next  big  thing  comes  along  you  will  do  that  too." 

Without  actually  quoting  those  words  to  herself,  she  ex 
perienced  a  sudden  confidence  that  was  almost  serene.  In  a 
few  minutes  now,  not  more  than  five,  probably — she  hoped 
not  more  than  that — something  incalculable,  tremendous,  was 
going  to  begin  happening  to  her.  A  thing  whose  issue  would 
in  all  likelihood  determine  the  course  of  her  whole  life.  There 
might  be  a  struggle,  a  tempest,  but  she  made  no  effort  to  fore 
see  the  nature  of  it.  She  just  relaxed  physical  and  spiritual 
muscles  and  waited.  Only  she  hoped  she  wouldn't  have  to 
wait  long. 

No — there  was  the  bell. 

It  was  altogether  fortunate  for  Rose  that  she  had  attempted 
no  preparation,  because  the  situation  she  found  herself  in 
when  she'd  opened  the  door  for  her  husband,  shaken  hands 
with  him,  led  him  into  her  sitting-room  and  asked  him  to  sit 
down,  was  one  that  the  wildest  cast  of  her  imagination  would 
never  have  suggested  as  a  possible  one  for  her  and  Rodney. 
And  it  lasted — recurred,  at  least,  whenever  they  were  together 
— almost  unaltered,  for  two  whole  days. 

533 


534  THE    HEAL   ADVENTURE 

It  was  his  manner,  slie  felt  sure,  that  had  created  it;  and 
yet,  so  prompt  and  automatic  had  been  her  response  that  she 
couldn't  be  sure,  not  for  the  first  half -hour  or  so,  anyway, 
that  he  wasn't  attributing  it  to  her.  It  wasn't  so  much  the 
first  words  he  said,  when,  opening  her  door,  she  saw  him 
standing  in  the  hallway,  as  it  was  his  attitude;  his  rather 
formal  attitude;  the  way  he  held  his  hat;  the  fact — this  was 
absurd,  of  course,  but  she  reconstructed  the  memory  very 
clearly  afterward — that  his  clothes  were  freshly  pressed.  It 
was  the  slightly  anxious,  very  determined  attitude  of  an 
estimable  and  rather  shy  young  man  making  his  first  call  on 
a  young  lady,  on  whom  he  is  desperately  desirous  of  making 
a  favorable  impression. 

What  he  said  was  something  not  very  coherent  about  being 
very  glad  and  its  being  very  good  of  her,  and  almost  simul 
taneously  she  gasped  out  that  she  was  glad,  and  wouldn't  he 
come  in.  She  held  out  her  hand  to  him,  politely,  and  he, 
compensating  for  an  imperceptible  hesitation  with  a  kind  of 
clumsy  haste,  took  it  and  released  it  almost  as  hastily.  She 
showed  him  where  to  hang  his  coat  and  hat,  conducted  him 
into  her  sitting-room  and  invited  him  to  sit  down.  And  there 
they  were 

And  he  was  Eodney,  and  she  was  Rose !  It  was  like  an 
absurd  dream. 

For  a  while  she  talked  desperately,  under  the  same  sort  of 
delirious  conviction  one  has  in  dreams  that  if  he  desists  one 
moment  from  some  grotesquely  futile  form  of  activity  a  cos 
mic  disaster  will  instantly  take  place.  A  moment  of  silence 
between  them  would  be,  she  felt,  something  unthinkably  ter 
rible.  It  was  not  a  fear  of  what  might  emerge  from  such  a 
silence,  the  sudden  rending  of  veils  and  the  confrontation  of 
two  realities;  it  was  a  dread,  purely,  of  the  silence  itself. 
But  the  feeling  did  not  last  very  long. 

"Won't  you  smoke?"  she  asked  suddenly;  and  hurried  on 
when  he  hesitated,  "I  don't  do  it  myself,  but  most  of  my 
friends  do,  and  I  keep  the  things."  From  a  drawer  in  her 
writing-desk  she  produced  a  tin  box  of  cigarettes.  "They're 
your  kind — unless  you've  changed,"  she  commented,  and  went 


COULEUK-DE-BOSE  535 

over  to  the  mantel  shelf  for  an  ash-tray  and  a  match-safe. 
The  match-safe  was  empty  and  she  left  the  room  to  get  a 
fresh  supply  from  her  kitchenette. 

On  the  inner  face  of  her  front  door  was  a  big  mirror,  and 
in  it,  as  she  came  back  through  the  unlighted  passage,  she 
saw  her  husband.  He  was  sitting  just  as  she'd  left  him,  and 
as  his  face  was  partly  turned  away  from  her,  it  co_uld  not 
have  been  from  the  expression  of  it  that  she  got  her  revelation. 
But  she  stopped  there  in  the  dark  and  caught  her  breath  and 
leaned  back  against  the  wall  and  squeezed  the  tears  out  of 
her  eyes. 

Perhaps  it  was  just  because  he  was  sitting  so  still,  a  thing 
it  was  utterly  unlike  him  to  do.  The  Rodney  of  her  memories 
was  always  ranging  about  the  rooms  that  confined  him.  Or 
the  grip  of  the  one  hand  she  could  see  upon  the  chair-arm  it 
rested  on  may  have  had  something  to  do  with  it.  But  it  was 
not,  really,  a  consciously  deductive  process  at  all;  just  a 
clairvoyant  look — into  him,  and  a  sudden,  complete,  utterly 
confident  understanding, 

He  had  come  down  here  to  New  York  to  make  another 
beginning.  He  meant  to  assert  no  rights,  not  even  in  their 
common  memories.  He  would  make  no  appeal.  But  some 
thing  that  he  felt  he  had  forfeited  he  was  going  to  try  to  earn 
back.  What  was  the  thing  he  sought — her  friendship,  or  her 
love?  She  knew!  No  plea  that  the  inspired  rhetoric  of 
passion  could  be  capable  of  could  have  convinced  her  of  his 
love  for  he«  and  of  his  need  for  her  love  as  did  the  divine 
absurdity  of  this  attempt  of  his  to  show  her  that  she  need 
give  him — nothing.  She  knew.  Oh,  how  she  knew ! 

She  stole  back  into  her  little  kitchen  and  shut  the  door  and 
leaned  giddily  against  it,  trying  to  get  her  breath  to  coming 
steadily  again.  At  last  she  straightened  up  and  wiped  her 
eyes.  A  smile  played  across  her  lips ;  the  smile  of  deep  mater 
nal  tenderness.  Then  she  picked  up  her  box  of  matches  and 
carried  them  to  him  in  the  sitting-room. 

He  stayed  that  first  evening  a  little  less  than  an  hour,  and 
when  he  got  up  to  go,  she  made  no  effort  to  detain  him.  The 
thing  had  been,  as  its  unbroken  surface  could  testify,  a  highly 


536  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

successful  first  call.  Before  she  let  him  go,  though,  she  asked 
him  how  long  he  was  going  to  be  in  New  York,  and  on  get 
ting  a  very  indeterminate  answer  that  offered  a  minimum 
of  "two  or  three  days"  and  a  maximum  that  could  not  even 
be  guessed  at,  she  said : 

"I  hope  you're  not  going  to  be  too  dreadfully  busy  for  us 
to  see  a.  lot  of  each  other.  I  wish  we  might  manage  it  once 
every  day." 

That  shook  him;  for  a  moment,  she  thought  the  lightning 
was  going  to  strike  and  stood  very  still  holding  her  breath, 
waiting  for  it. 

But  he  steadied  himself,  said  he  could  certainly  manage 
that  if  she  could,  and  as  the  elevator  came  up  in  response  to 
her  ring,  said  that  he  would  call  her  up  in  the  morning  at 
her  office. 

She  puzzled  a  little  during  the  intermittent  processes  of 
undressing,  over  why  she  had  let  him  go  like  that.  She  found 
it  easy  to  name  some  of  the  things  that  were  not  the  reason. 
It  was  not — oh,  a  thousand  times  it  was  not ! — that  she  wasn't 
quite  sure  of  him.  There  was  no  expressing  the  completeness 
of  her  certainty  that,  with  a  look,  a  sudden  holding  out  of  the 
hands  to  him,  the  release  of  one  little  love-cry  from  her  lips,  a 
half-articulate,  "Come  and  take  me,  Eoddy!  That's  all  I 
want !"  she  could  have  shattered,  annihilated,  that  brittle  re 
straint  of  his ;  released  the  full  tempest  of  his  passion ;  found 
herself — lost  herself — in  his  embrace. 

Certainly  it  was  no  doubt  of  that  that  had  held  her  back. 
And,  no  more  than  doubt,  was  it  pride  or  modesty.  The  one 
thing  her  whole  being  was  crying  out  for  was  a  complete  sur 
render  to  him. 

But  the  real  reason  seemed  rather  absurd,  when  she  tried 
to  state  it  to  herself.  She  had  felt  that  it  would  be  a  brutal 
thing  to  do.  Eeally,  her  feeling  toward  him  was  that  of  a 
mother  toward  a  child  who,  having,  he  thinks,  merited  her 
displeasure,  offers  her,  by  Avay  of  atonement,  some  dearly 
prized  possession;  an  iron  fire-engine,  a •  woolly  sheep.  What 
mother  wouldn't  accept  an  offering  like  that  gravely ! 

This  thing  that  Eodney  had  offered  her,  the  valiant,  heart 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  537 

breaking  pretense  that  she  needn't  give  him  anything — to 
her,  whose  aching  need  was  to  give  him  everything  she  had ! 
— was  just  as  absurd  as  the  child's  toy  could  have  been.  But 
it  had  cost  him  .  .  .  Oh,  what  must  it  not  have  cost  him 
in  struggle  and  sacrifice,  to  construct  that  pitiful,  transparent 
pretense  ! — to  maintain  that  manner !  And  the  struggle  and 
the  sacrifice  must  not  be  cheapened,  made  absurd  by  a  sudden 
shattering  demonstration  that  they'd  been  unnecessary.  His 
pretense  must  be  melted,  not  shattered.  And  until  it  could 
be  melted,  that  aching  need  of  hers  must  wait. 

And  then  she  realized  that  the  ache  was  gone — the  tor 
menting  restless  hunger  for  him  that  had  been  nagging  at 
her  ever  since  the  first  rush  of  spring  was  somehow  appeased. 
She'd  have  said,  twenty-four  hours  ago,  that  to  be  with  him, 
have  him  near  her,  in  any  other  relation  than  that  of  her 
lover,  would  be  unendurable.  Twenty-four  hours  ago!  She 
thought  of  that  as  she  was  winding  her  watch.  It  seemed  in 
credible  that  it  was  no  longer  than  that  since  the  saccharine 
little  sob  in  John  McCormack's  voice  as  he  had  sung  "Just  a 
little  love,  a  li-ttle  ki-iss,"  had  driven  her  frantic. 

She  turned  out  her  light  and  opened  her  bedroom  window. 
The  phonograph  across  the  court  was  going  again.  But  now, 
evidently,  its  master  had  come  back  from  Pittsburgh,  for  it 
was  singing  lustily,  "That's  why  I  wish  again  that  I  was  in 
Michigan,  back  on  the  farm." 

Rose  smiled  her  old  wide  smile,  and  cuddled  her  cheek  into 
the  pillow.  She  was  the  happiest  person  in  the  world. 

When  he  called  her  up  the  next  morning,  she  asked  him  to 
come  down  to  the  premises  of  Dane  &  Company  (it  was  a 
loft  on  lower  Fifth  Avenue)  about  noon  and  go  out  to  lunch 
with  her,  and  she  made  no  secret  of  her  motive  in  selecting 
their  rendezvous.  "I'd  like  to  have  you  see  what  our  place 
is  like/'  she  said,  "though  it  isn't  like  anything  much  just 
now,  between  seasons  this  way.  Still  you  can  get  an  idea." 

He  said  he  would  be  immensely  interested  to  see  the  place, 
and  from  the  cadence  of  his  voice  was  apparently  prepared  to 
let  the  conversation  end  there.  But  she  prolonged  it  a  little. 
,  "Do  you  hear  from — Chicago  while  you're  down  here. 


538  THE   HEAL   ADVENTURE 

Roddy?"  she  asked.  "Whether  everything's  all  right — at 
home,  I  mean?" 

It  was  a  second  or  two  before  he  answered,  hut  when  he 
did,  his  voice  was  perfectly  steady. 

"Yes,"  he  said.  "I  get  a  night-letter  every  morning  from 
Miss  French.  (This  was  Mrs.  Ruston's  successor.)  It's — 
everything's  all  right." 

"Good-by,  then,  till  noon/?  she  said.  And  if  he  could  have 
seen  the  smile  that  was  on  her  lips,  and  the  brightness  that 
was  in  her  eyes  as  she  said  it  .  .  .  ! 

It  was  a  part,  you  see,  of  his  Quixotic  determination  to 
make  no  claims,  that  he  had  not  said  a  word,  during  his  eve 
ning  call,  about  the  twins — her  babies ! 

On  the  stroke  of  twelve  his  card  was  brought  to  her,  and 
she  went  out  into  their  bare  little  waiting-room  to  meet  him. 

"We  aren't  a  regular  dressmaking  establishment,  you  see," 
she  said.  "The  people  we  have  to  impress  aren't  the  ones  we 
make  the  clothes  for.  So  we  can  be  as  shabby  down  here  as 
we  please,  and  Alice  says — Alice  Perosini,  you  know — that 
our  shabbiness  really  does  impress  them.  Shows  we  don't 
care  what  they  think. 

"You're  sure  you've  plenty  of  time  to  see  around  in?"  she 
went  on.  "That  it  won't  cut  into  your  time  for  lunch  ?" 

He  made  it  plain  that  he  had  plenty  of  time,  and  she  took 
him  into  her  own  studio,  a  big  north-lighted  room  at  the  back 
of  the  building,  with  the  painter's  manikins  that  Jimmy 
Wallace  had  told  about,  standing  about  in  it,  and  some  queer- 
looking  electric-light  fixtures  suggestive  of  the  stage;  a  big 
tin-lined  box  with  half  a  dozen  powerful  tungsten  lamps  in 
it,  and  grooves  in  the  mouth  of  it  for  the  reception  of  colored 
slides.  And  a  sort  of  search-light  that  swung  on  a  pivot. 
There  was  a  high  cutting-table  with  a  deep  indentation  in  it, 
in  which  Rose  could  stand  with  her  work  all  around  her.  On 
a  shelf  in  a  corner  he  noticed  two  or  three  little  figures  twelve 
inches  high  or  so  that  he'd  have  thought  of  as  dolls  had  it 
not  been  that  their  small  heads  gave  them  the  scale  of  adults. 
Ro?e  followed  his  glance. 

"I  play  with  thoee,"  she  said.    "Dress  them  in  all  sorts  of 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  539 

things — tissue-paper  mostly.  It  seems  easier  to  catch  an  idea 
small  in  the  tips  of  my  fingers,  and  then  let  it  grow  up.  You 
have  to  find  out  for  yourself  how  you  can  do  things,  don't 
you?" 

Then  she  took  him  out  into  the  workroom,  where  there 
were  more  cutting-tables  and  power-driven  sewing-machines. 

"  'It  never  rains  but  it  pours/  is  the  motto  of  this  business," 
she  told  him.  "Nobody  ever  knows  what  he  wants  until  the 
very  last  minute,  and  then  he  wants  it  the  next,  and  every 
body  wants  it  at  once.  And  then  this  place  is  like  a  mad 
house.  We  simply  go  out  of  our  heads.  It  was  like  that  when 
Jimmy  Wallace  was  down  here.  I  hadn't  a  minute  for  him/' 

She  added  deliberately,  "I'm  glad  you  didn't  come  down 
then,"  and  went  swiftly  on  to  explain  to  him  a  sort  of  panto 
graph  arrangement  which  could  be  set  with  reference  to  the 
measurements  of  the  manikin  Rose  had  designed  the  costume 
upon,  and  those  of  the  girl  who  was  going  to  wear  it,  so  that 
the  pattern  for  the  costume  itself,  as  distinct  from  Rose's 
master-pattern,  was  cut  almost  automatically  to  fit. 

"It's  not  really  automatic,  of  course,"  she  said.  "No  cos 
tume's  done  until  I  have  seen  it  on  the  girl  who's  going  to 
wear  it.  But  it  does  save  time." 

Alice  Perosini  came  in  just  then,  and  a  breath-taking  spec 
tacle  she'd  have  been  to  most  men  in  the  frock  she  had  on. 
But  it  was  not  Rodney  who  gasped.  It  was  Alice  herself  who 
almost  did,  when  Rose  introduced  him  to  her,  without  ex 
planations,  as  Mr.  Aldrich  and  said  she  was  going  out  to  lunch 
with  Kim. 

"And  there's  no  telling  when  I'll  be  back,"  she  added,  "so 
if  there's  anything  to  talk  about,  you'd  better  seize  the  chance 
and  tell  me  now." 

Alice  couldn't  be  blamed  if  her  face  was  a  study.  She  knew 
that  Aldrich  was  the  name  of  Rose's  abandoned  husband,  and 
it  would  have  been  natural  to  believe  that  this  highly  im 
pressive-looking  person,  whom  Rose  so  casually  introduced, 
was  he.  But  the  matter-of-fact  way  in  which  Rose  was  trot 
ting  him  about  the  shop,  and  spoke  of  carrying  him  off  to 
lunch,  seemed  to  make  such  a  conclusion  fantastic. 


540 

There  was  nothing  casual  about  the  man,  though,  she  re 
flected  afterward.  He'd  taken  his  part,  adequately  and  po 
litely,  of  course,  in  the  introduction  and  the  fragmentary 
word  or  two  of  small-talk  that  had  followed  it,  but  Alice 
doubted  if  he'd  really  seen  her  at  all.  And  when  a  man  didn't 
see  Alice — this  was  a  line  of  reasoning  she  was  quite  candidly 
capable  of — it  meant  an  intensity  of  preoccupation  that  one 
might  call  monstrous — portentous,  anyway. 

Eose  asked  him  if  he  minded  the  Brevoort,  which  was  near 
by  and  airy,  on  a  warm  spring  day  like  this,  and  he  assented 
to  it  with  enthusiasm.  He  hadn't  been  there  in  years,  he 
said.  She  wished,  a  little  later,  that  she  had  thought  twice 
and  had  taken  him  somewhere  else,  where  she  wasn't  quite  so 
obviously  well  acquainted.  The  cordial  salutation  of  the 
head  waiter,  the  number  of  people  who  nodded  at  her  from 
this  table  or  that,  might  well  have  been  dispensed  with  on  an 
occasion  like  this.  And  the  climax  was  when  the  table  waiter, 
well  accustomed  to  having  her  bring  guests  of  either  sex  to 
lunch  with  her,  and  on  confidential  terms  with  her  gustatory 
preferences,  handed  her  a  menu — as  a  matter  of  form — told 
her  what  he  thought  she'd  like  to-day,  and,  getting  out  his 
pencil  and  his  card,  prepared  to  write  it  down.  She  saw 
Eodney  looking  pretty  blank,  so  she  checked  the  waiter  and 
said: 

"I  think  I  did  ask  you  to  lunch  with  me,  but  if  you'd  rather 
I  lunched  with  you  .  .  .  You  can  have  it  whichever  way 
you  like." 

He  hesitated  just  an  instant;  then  said  he'd  like  to  lunch 
with  her.  And  somehow  their  eyes  met  over  that  in  a  way 
that,  once  more,  made  Rose  hold  her  breath.  But  the  light 
ning  didn't  strike  that  time. 

Even  so,  their  hour  wasn't  wasted  on  the  polite  topics  of 
custom-made  conversation,  as,  for  a  while,  she  had  feared  it 
would  be;  because  he  asked  her,  presently — and  she  could  see 
he  really  wanted  to  know — how  she  had  got  started  in  this 
costuming  business.  It  was  evidently  a  thing  she  had  a 
genius  for,  but  how  had  she  found  it  out,  and  how  had  she 


COITLEUR-DE-ROSE  541 

worked  out  that  technique  which,  even  to  the  eyes  of  his 
ignorance,  was  clearly  extraordinary? 

And  Rose,  beginning  a  little  timidly,  because  she  knew 
there  were  rocks  ahead  for  him,  told  him  the  tale  that  had 
its  beginning  in  Lessing's  store ;  the  story  of  Mrs.  Goldsmith 
and  her  bad  taste,  of  the  Poiret  model  that  had  suggested  her 
great  idea,  of  the  offer  she  had  made  Galbraith,  the  way  she 
had  bought  her  dressmaker's  form  and  her  bolts  of  paper- 
cambric  out  of  the  Christmas  rush,  and  had  cut  out  her  pat 
terns  in  the  dead  of  nights  after  rehearsals,  up  in  her  little 
room  on  Clark  Street.  She  told  him  of  the  wild  rush  with 
which  the  costumes  themselves  got  made  down  under  the 
stage  at  the  Globe;  of  Galbraith's  enthusiasm,  of  the  bargain 
she'd  driven  with  Goldsmith  and  Block — the  unwittingly 
good  bargain  that  had  left  her  a  profit  of  over  two  hundred 
dollars.  She  told  him  how  Goldsmith  and  Block  had  driven 
a  good  bargain  of  their  own,  hiring  her  at  her  chorus-girl's 
salary  for  the  last  two  delirious  weeks;  how  insanely  hard 
she'd  worked,  and  how,  at  last,  after  the  opening  performance, 
Galbraith  had  offered  her  a  job  in  New  York  when  he  should 
be  ready  for  her. 

Somehow,  while  she  told  it,  though  it  was  only  occasionally 
that  she  glanced  up  at  him — somehow,  as  she  told  it,  she 
seemed  to  be  hearing  it  with  his  ears — to  be  thinking,  actually, 
the  very  thoughts  that  were  going  through  his  mind. 

The  central  cord  of  it  all,  that  everything  else  depended 
from,  was,  she  knew,  the  reflection  that  this  triumphant  nar 
rative  he  was  listening  to  now,  had  been  waiting  on  her  lips 
to  be  told  to  him  that  night  in  the  room  on  Clark  Street,  and 
that  the  smoking  smoldering  fires  of  his  outraged  pride  and 
masculine  sense  of  possession,  had  made  the  telling  impossible 
—had  made  everything  impossible  but  that  dull  outcry  of 
hers  that  it  had  ended — like  this. 

But  he  never  winced.  Indeed,  now  and  then  when  she  tried 
to  run  ahead  in  a  way  to  elide  this  incident  or  that,  he  asked 
questions  that  brought  out  all  the  details,  and  at  the  end  he 
said  with  undisguised  gravity,  but  quite  steadily: 


542  THE    HEAL   ADVENTUKE 

"So  after  the  play  opened  you  were  just  waiting  for  Gal- 
braith  to  send  for  you.  Why — why  did  you  go  on  the  road, 
instead  of  to  New  York  ?" 

"He  hadn't  sent  for  me  yet,  and  I'd  made  up  my  mind,  by 
that  time,  that  he  meant  not  to.  And  I  was  too  tired  just 
then  to  come  down  here  and  try  for  anything  else.  I  went 
on  the  road  for  a  sort  of  rest-cure." 

He  sat  for  a  good  while  after  that  in  a  reflective  silence. 
And,  at  the  end  of  it,  deliberately  introduced  a  new  and 
entirely  harmless  topic  of  conversation.  She  knew  why  he 
did  that.  She  understood  now  that  there  was  more  on  his 
program  than  his  manner  last  night  had  indicated.  That  had 
been  a  preliminary,  but  the  past  wasn't  to  be  ignored  forever. 
A  time  was  coming  when  the  issue  between  them  should  be 
brought  up  and  settled.  But  the  time  was  not  now,  nor  the 
place  this  crowded  restaurant. 

She  was  perfectly  docile  to  his  new  conversational  lead,  but 
the  fact  that  she  yielded,  that  she  knew  it  would  be  beyond 
her  powers  to  force  that  issue  until  he  was  ready  for  it,  thrilled 
her — brought  the  blood  into  her  cheeks.  The  thing  he  was 
doing  might  be  absurd,  but  his  way  of  doing  it  was  not  ab 
surd.  He  had  changed,  somehow,  or  something  had  changed 
between  them.  She  engaged  all  his  powers.  If  there  should 
be  a  struggle  now,  his  mind  would  not  betray  him. 

Just  before  they  left  the  restaurant  he  asked  her  if  she 
would  dine  with  him  some  night  and  go  to  a  sh#w  afterward, 
and  when  she  said  she  would  he  asked  what  night  would  be 
convenient  to  her. 

Her  inflection  was  perfectly  demure  and  even  casual,  but 
nothing  could  keep  the  sudden  "richening"  that  Jimmy  \Yal- 
lace  had  tried  to  describe  out  of  her  voice,  and  the  light  of 
mischief  danced  openly  in  her  eyes  when  she  said : 

"Why,  to-night's  all  right  for  me."  She  added,  "If  that's 
not  too  soon  for  you." 

He  flushed  and  dropped  his  hands  from  the  edge  of  the 
table  where  they'd  been  resting,  but  he  answered  evenly 
enough : 

"No,  it's  not  too  soon  for  me." 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  543 

And  then  force  of  habit  betrayed  Rose  into  a  stupid  blunder 
that  almost  precipitated  a  small  quarrel. 

"Tell  me  what  you'd  like  to  see,"  she  said,  "and  I'll  tele 
phone  for  the  seats." 

Then,  at  his  horrified  stare,  she  gasped  out  an  explanation. 
"Roddy,  I  didn't  mean  buy  the  seats!  I  don't  have  to  buy 
seats  at  any  theater.  And  at  this  time  of  year  they're  so  glad 
to  have  somebody  to  give  them  to  that  it  seems  sort  of— 
wicked  to  pay  real  money." 

"It's  my  mistake,"  he  said.  "Naturally,  going  to  the 
theater  wouldn't  be  much  of  a — treat  to  you.  I'd  forgotten 
that." 

"Going  with  you  would  be  a  treat  to  me,"  she  said  earnestly. 
"That's  why  I  didn't  think  about  the  other  part  of  it.  But  I 
needn't  have  been  so  stupid  as  that.  Will  you  forget  I  said  it, 
please  ?" 

He  smiled  now  at  himself,  the  first  smile  of  genuine  amuse 
ment  she  had  seen  on  his  lips  for — how  long  ? 

"And  I  needn't  have  been  quite  so  horrified,"  he  admitted. 
"All  the  same,  I  hope  I  may  manage  to  hit  on  a  restaurant 
up-town  somewhere,,  where  the  waiter  won't  hand  you  the 
check." 

It  was  on  this  note  that  he  parted  from  her  at  Dane  & 
Company's  doorway. 

But  the  ice  didn't  melt  so  fast  as  she  had  expected  it  would, 
and  she  went  to  bed  that  night,  after  he'd  brought  her  home 
in  a  taxi  and,  having  told  the  chauffeur  to  wait,  formally 
escorted  her  to  her  elevator,  in  a  state  of  mind  not  quite  so 
serenely  happy  as  that  of  the  night  before.  She  had  held  her 
breath  a  good  many  times  during  the  dinner,  and  even  in  the 
theater,  where  certain  old  memories  and  associations  sprang 
at  them  both,  as  it  were,  from  ambush.  But  always,  at  the 
breaking  point,  he  managed  to  summon  up  unexpected  re 
serves  for  resistance^  intrenched  himself  in  the  manner  of  his 
first  call. 

Rose  both  smiled  and  wept  over  her  review  of  this  evening, 
and  was  a  long  while  getting  off  to  sleep.  fShe  felt  she  couldn't 
stand  this  state  of  things  much  longer. 


544  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

But  it  was  not  required  of  her.  With  the  last  of  the  next 
day's  light,  the  ice  broke  up  and  the  floods  came. 

She  had  taken  him  to  a  studio  tea  in  the  upper  sixties  just 
off  West  End  Avenue,  the  proprietors  of  the  studio  being  a 
tousled,  bearded,  blond  anarchist  of  a  painter  and  his  exceed 
ingly  pretty,  smart,  frivolous-looking  wife — who  had  more 
sense  than  she  was  willing  to  let  appear.  They  had  lived  in 
Paris  for  years,  but  the  fact  that  he  had  a  German-sounding 
name  had  driven  them  back  to  New  York.  It  was  through 
Gertrude  that  Eose  had  got  acquainted  with  them — she  hav 
ing  wrung  from  Abe  Shuman  permission  for  the  painter  to 
prowl  around  back-stage  and  make  notes  for  a  series  of 
queerly  lighted  pictures  of  chorus-girls  and  dancers — "Degas 
— and  then  some/'  as  his  admirers  said.  Gertrude  was  at  the 
tea  and  two  or  three  others.  It  wasn't  a  party. 

The  two  men  had  instinctively  drawn  controversial  swords 
almost  at  sight  of  each  other  and  for  the  hour  and  a  half  that 
they  were  together  the  combat  raged  mightily,  to  the  unmixed 
satisfaction  of  both  participants.  The  feelings  of  the  by 
standers  were  perhaps  more  diverse,  but  Rose,  at  least,  en 
joyed  herself  thoroughly,  not  only  over  seeing  her  husband's 
big,  formidable,  finely  poised  mind  in  action  again,  but  over 
a  change  that  had  taken  place  in  the  nature  of  some  of  his 
ideas.  The  talk,  of  course,  ranged  everywhere:  Socialism, 
feminism,  law  and  its  crimes,  art  and  the  social  mind.  Ger 
trude  took  a  hand  in  it  now  and  then,  and  it  was  something 
Rodney  said  to  her,  in  answer  to  a  remark  about  dependent 
wives,  that  really  made  Rose  sit  up. 

"Wives  aren't  dependents,"  he  said,  "except  as  they  let 
their  husbands  make  them  think  they  are.  Or  only  in  very 
rare  cases.  Certainly  I  don't  know  of  a  wife  who  doesn't 
render  her  husband  valuable  economic  services  in  exchange 
for  her  support.  I  can  hardly  imagine  one.  Of  course  if 
they  don't  recognize  that  these  services  are  valuable,  they  can 
be  made  to  feel  dependent  all  right." 

Gertrude  demurred.  She  was  willing  to  admit  that  a  wife 
who  took  care  of  a  husband's  house,  cooked  his  meals,  brought 
up  his  children,  did  him  an  economic  service  and  that  if  she 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  545 

didn't  feel  that  she  was  earning  her  way  in  the  world  it  was 
because  she  had  been  imposed  on.  But  here  in  New  York, 
anyway — she  didn't  know  how  it  might  be  out  in  Chicago — 
one  didn't  have  to  resort  to  his  imagination  to  conjure  up  a 
wife  who  rendered  none  of  these  services  whatever.  "They 
live,  thousands  of  them,  in  smart  up-town  apartments,  don't 
do  a  lick  of  work,  choke  up  Fifth  Avenue  with  their  limou 
sines  in  the  afternoon,  dress  like  birds  of  paradise,  or  as  near 
to  it  as  they  can  come,  dine  with  their  husbands  in  the  res 
taurants,  go  to  the  first  nights,  eat  lobster  Newburg  after 
ward,  and  spend  the  next  morning  in  bed  getting  over  it. 
Those  that  can't  afford  that  kind  of  life  scrape  along  giving 
the  best  imitation  of  it  they  know  how.  Thousands  of 
them — thousands  and  thousands.  If  they  aren't  depend 
ents  .  .  ." 

"They're  not,  though,"  said  Rodney.  "Not  a  bit  of  it. 
They're  giving  their  husbands  an  economic  service  of  a  pe 
culiarly  indispensable  sort.  The  first  requisite  for  success 
to  the  husbands  of  women  who  live  like  that  is  the  appear 
ance  of  success.  Their  status,  their  front,  is  the  one  tiling 
they  can't  do  without.  Well,  and  it's  a  curious  fact  that  a 
man  can't  keep  up  his  own  front.  If  he  tries  to  dress  ex 
travagantly,  wear  diamonds,  spend  his  money  on  himself,  he 
doesn't  look  prosperous.  He  looks  a  fool.  People  won't  take 
him  seriously.  If  he  can  get  a  wife  who's  ornamental,  who  has 
attractive  manners,  who  can  convey  the  appearance  of  being 
expensive  without  being  vulgar,  she's  of  a  perfectly  enormous 
economic  advantage  to  him.  She'd  only  have  to  quit  buying 
the  sort  of  clothes  he  could  parade  her  in,  and  begin  spoiling 
her  looks  with  a  menial  domestic  routine,  to  draw  howls  of 
protest  from  him.  Only,  so  long  as  she  doesn't  call  his  bluff, 
she  leaves  him  free  to  think  that  he's  doing  it  all  for  her  and 
that  except  for  her  extravagance— extravagance,  mind  you, 
that  nine  times  out  of  ten  he's  absolutely  rammed  down  her 
throat — he'd  be  as  rich,  really,  as  he  has  to  try  to  pretend  he 
is.  He  tells  her  so,  with  perfect  sincerity — and  she  believes 
it."  Rose  enjoyed  the  look  in  Gertrude's  face  as  she  listened 
to  that. 


546  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

It  was  half  past  six  or  thereabout  when  they  left  the  studio, 
and  the  late  May  afternoon  was  at  its  loveliest.  It  was  the 
sort  of  day,  as  Eodney  said,  that  convicted  you,  the  minute 
you  came  out  of  it,  of  abysmal  folly  in  having  wasted  any  of 
it  indoors. 

"I  want  to  walk,"  said  Rose,  "after  that  tea,  if  I'm  ever  to 
want  any  dinner." 

He  nodded  a  little  absently,  she  thought,  and  fell  in  step 
beside  her.  There  was  no  mention  at  any  time,  of  their 
destination. 

It  was  a  good  while  before  Eose  got  the  key  to  his  preoccu 
pation.  They  had  turned  into  the  park  at  Sixty-sixth  Street, 
and  were  half-way  over  to  the  Fifth  Avenue  corner  at  Fifty- 
ninth,  before  he  spoke  out. 

"On  a  day  like  this,"  he  said,  "to  have  sat  there  for  two 
or  three  mortal  hours  arguing  about  stale  ideas !  Threshing 
over  the  straw — almost  as  silly  an  occupation  as  chess — when 
we  might  have  been  out  here,  being  alive !  But  it  must  have 
seemed  natural  to  you  to  hear  me  going  on  like  that."  And 
then  with  a  burst,  before  she  could  speak : 

"You  must  remember  me  as  the  most  blindly  opinionated 
fool  in  the  world  !" 

She  caught  her  breath,  then  said  very  quietly,  with  a  warm 
little  laugh  in  her  voice,  "That's  not  how  I  remember  you, 
Eodney." 

She  declined  to  help  him  when  he  tried  to  scramble  back 
to  the  safe  shores  of  conventional  conversation.  That  sort  of 
thing  had  lasted  long  enough.  She  just  walked  along  in  step 
with  him  and,  for  her  part,  in  silence.  It  wasn't  long  before 
he  fell  silent  too. 

A  thing  that  Eose  hadn't  counted  on  was  the  effect  pro 
duced  on  both  of  them  just  by  walking  along  like  this  to 
gether,  side  by  side,  in  step.  Just  the  rhythm  of  it  established 
a  sort  of  communion — and  it  was  a  communion  fortified  by 
many  associations.  Practically  the  whole  of  their  courtship, 
from  the  day  when  he  dropped  off  the  street-car  with  her  In 
the  rain  and  walked  her  over  to  the  elevated  and  kept  her 
note-books,  down  to  the  day  on  the  bridge  over  the  Drainage 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  547 

Canal  in  the  swirl  of  that  March  blizzard,  when  she'd  felt  his 
first  embrace,  had  been  on  foot  like  this,  tramping  along  side 
by  side;  miles  and  miles  and  miles,  as  she'd  told  her  mother. 
And  there  had  been  other  walks  since.  Do  you  remember  the 
last  time  they  had  walked  together?  It  was  from  the  stage 
door  of  the  Globe  theater  to  her  little  room  on  North  Clark 
Street.  Rose  remembered  it  and  she  felt  sure  that  he  did. 
The  same  singing  wire  of  memories  and  associations  that  had 
vibrated  between  them,  then  was  vibrating  between  them  now 
and  drawing  up  palpably  tighter  with  every  half-mile  they 
walked.  Their  pace  quickened  a  little. 

Straight  down  Fifth  Avenue  they  walked  to  the  corner  of 
Thirteenth  Street,  and  then  west.  And  when  they  stopped 
and  faced  each  other  in  the  entrance  to  the  gray  brick  build 
ing  where  Rose's  apartment  was,  it  was  at  the  end  of  a  mile 
or  more  of  absolutely  unbroken  silence.  And  facing  each 
other  there,  all  that  was  said  between  them  was  her : 

"You'll  come  in,  won't  you  ?"  and  his,  "Yes." 

But  the  gravity  with  which  she'd  uttered  the  invitation  and 
the  tenseness  of  his  acceptance  of  it,  the  square  look  that 
passed  between  them,  marked  an  end  of  something  and  the 
beginning  of  something  new. 

She  left  him  in  her  sitting-room  while  she  went  through 
into  her  bedroom  to  take  off  her  hat  and  jacket  and  take  a 
glance  into  her  mirror.  When  she  came  back,  she  found  him 
standing  at  her  window  looking  out.  He  didn't  turn  when 
she  came  in,  but  almost  immediately  he  began  speaking.  She 
went  rather  limp  at  the  sound  of  his  voice  and  dropped  down 
on  a  cushioned  ottoman  in  front  of  the  fireplace,  and  squeezed 
her  hands  together  between  her  knees. 

"I  don't  know  how  much  you  will  have  understood,"  he 
began,  "probably  a  good  deal.  You  told  me  in  Dubuque — as 
you  were  quite  right  to  tell  me — that  I  mustn't  come  back  to 
you.  And  now  I've  disobeyed  you  and  come.  What  I  hope 
you  will  have  guessed  is  that  I  wouldn't  have  come  except 
that  I'd  something  to  tell  you — something  different  from  the 
—idiocies  I  tormented  you  with  in  Dubuque; — something  I 
felt  you  were  entitled  to  be  told.  But  I  felt — this  is  what  you 


548 

won't  have  understood — I  felt  that  I  hadn't  any  right  to 
speak  to  you  at  all,  about  anything  vital,  about  anything  that 
concerned  us,  until  I'd  given  you  some  sort  of  guarantee — 
until  I'd  shown  you  that  I  was  a  person  it  was  possible  to  deal 
reasonably  with." 

She  smiled,  then  pressed  her  hands  suddenly  to  her  eyes. 

"I  understood,"  she  said. 

"Well,  then  .  .  ."  But  he  didn't  at  once  go  on.  Stood 
there  a  while  longer  at  the  window,  then  crossed  the  room  and 
brought  up  before  her  book-shelves,  staring  blindly  at  the 
titles.  He  hadn't  looked  at  her  even  as  he  crossed  the  room. 

"Oh,  it's  a  presumptuous  thing  to  try  to  say,"  he  broke  out 
at  last,  "a  pitifully  unnecessary  thing  to  say,  because  you 
must  know  it  without  my  telling  you.  But  when  you  went 
away  you  said — you  said  it  was  because  you  hadn't — my 
— friendship !  You  said  that  was  the  thing  you  wanted  and 
that  you  were  going  to  try  to  earn  it.  And  in  Dubuque  you 
told  me  that  I'd  evidently  never  be  able  to  understand  that 
you  could  have  been  happy  in  that  room  on  Clark  Street,  that 
I'd  wanted  to  'rescue'  you  from ;  that  I'd  never  be  able  to  see 
that  the  thing  you  were  doing  there  was  a  fine  thing,  worth 
doing,  entitled  to  my  respect.  "Well,  the  things  I'd  been  say 
ing  to  you  and  the  things  I'd  been  doing,  justified  you  in 
thinking  that.  But  what  I've  come  down  here  to  say  is — is 
that  now — at  last — I  do  see  it" 

She  would  have  spoken  then  if  she  could  have  commanded 
her  voice,  and  as  it  was,  the  sound  she  made  conveyed  her 
intention  to  him,  for  he  turned  on  her  quickly  as  if  to  inter 
rupt  the  unspoken  words,  and  went  on  with  an  almost  savage 
bitterness. 

"Oh,  I'm  under  no  illusions  about  it.  I  had  my  chance  to 
see,  when  seeing  would  have  meant  something  to  you — helped 
you.  When  any  one  but  the  blindest  sort  of  fool  would  have 
seen.  I  didn't.  Now,  when  the  thing  is  patent  for  the  world 
to  see — now  that  Violet  Williamson  has  seen  it  and  Constance, 
and  God  knows  who  of  the  rest  of  them,  who  were  so  tactful 
and  sympathetic  about  my  'disgrace' — now  that  you've  won 
your  fight  without  any  help  from  me  ...  Without  any 


COULEUB-DE-BOSB  549 

help !  In  spite  of  every  hindrance  that  my  idiocy  could  put 
in  your  way !  Now,  after  all — I  come  and  tell  you  that  you've 
earned  the  thing  you've  set  out  to  get." 

There  was  a  little  silence  after  that.  She  got  up  and  took 
the  post  he  had  abandoned  at  the  window. 

"Why  did  you  do  it,  Roddy?"  she  asked.  "I  mean,  why 
did  you  want  to  come  and  tell  me  ?" 

"Why,  in  the  first  place,"  he  said,  "I  wanted  to  get  back  a 
little  of  my  self-respect.  I  couldn't  get  that  until  I'd  told 
you." 

This  time  the  silence  was  longer. 

"What  else  did  you  want?"  she  asked.  "What — in  the 
second  place  ?" 

"I  don't  know  why  I  put  it  like  that,"  he  said.  "Please 
don't  think  ...  I  can't  bear  to  have  you  think  that  I  came 
down  here  to — ask  anything  of  you — anything  in  the  way  of 
a  reward  for  having  seen  what  is  so  plain  to  every  one.  I 
haven't  any — claim  at  all.  I  want  to  earn  your  friendship. 
It's  the  biggest  thing  I've  got  to  hope  for.  But  I've  no  idea 
that  you  can  hand  it  out  to  me  ready-made.  I  believe  you'd 
do  it  if  you  could.  But  you  said  once,  yourself,  that  it  wasn't 
a  thing  that  could  be  given.  It  was  a  thing  that  had  to  be 
earned.  And  you  were  right  about  that,  as  you  were  about  so 
many  other  things.  Well,  I'm  going  to  try  to  earn  it." 

"Is  that — all  you  want?"  she  asked,  and  then  hearing  the 
little  gasp  he  gave,  she  swung  round  quickly  and  looked  at 
him.  It  was  pretty  dark  in  the  room,  but  his  face  in  the  dusk 
seemed  to  have  whitened. 

"Is  friendship  all  you  want  of  me,  Roddy?"  she  asked 
again. 

She  stood  there  waiting,  a  full  minute,  in  silence.  Then  she 
eaid,  "You  don't  have  to  tell  me  that.  Because  I  know.  Oh 
— oh,  my  dear,  how  well  I  know !" 

He  didn't  come  to  her ;  just  stood  there,  gripping  the  corner 
of  her  bookcase  and  staring  at  her  silhouette,  which  was  about 
all  he  could  see  of  her  against  the  window.  At  last  he  said, 
in  a  strained  dry  voice  she'd  hardly  have  known  for  his : 

"If  you  know  that — if  I've  let  you  see  that,  then  I've  done 


550  THE    EEAL    ADVENTURE 

just  about  the  last  despicable  tiling  there  was  left  for  me  to 
do.  I've  come  down  here  and — made  you  feel  sorry  for  me. 
So  that  with  that — divine — kindliness  of  yours,  you're  willing 
to  give  me — everything." 

He  straightened  up  and  came  a  step  nearer.  "Well,  I  won't 
have  it,  I  tell  you!  I  don't  know  how  you  guessed.  If  I'd 
dreamed  I  was  betraying  that  to  you  .  .  .  !  Don't  I  know 
— it's  burnt  into  me  so  that  I'll  never  forget — what  the  mem 
ory  of  my  love  must  be  to  you — the  memory  of  the  hideous 
tfiings  it's  done  to  you.  And  now,  after  all  that — after  you've 
won  your  fight — alone — and  stand  where  you  stand  now — for 
me  to  come  begging !  And  take  a  gift  like  that !  I  tell  you  it 
is  pity.  It  can't  be  anything  else." 

There  was  another  minute  of  silence,  and  then  he  heard  her 
make  a  little  noise  in  her  throat,  a  noise  that  would  have  been 
a  sob  had  there  not  been  something  like  a  laugh  in  it.  The 
next  moment  she  said,  "Come  over  here,  Eoddy,"  and  as  he 
hesitated,  as  if  he  hadn't  understood,  she  added,  "I  want  you 
to  look  at  me.  Over  here  by  the  window,  where  there's  light 
enough  to  see  me  by." 

He  came  wonderingly,  very  slowly,  but  at  last,  with  her 
outstretched  hand  she  reached  him  and  drew  him  around  be 
tween  her  and  the  window. 

"Look  into  my  face,"  she  commanded.  "Look  into  my 
eyes;  as  far  in  as  you  can.  Is  it — oh,  my  dearest" — the  sob 
of  pure  joy  came  again — "is  it  pity  that  you  see  ?" 

She'd  had  her  hands  upon  his  shoulders,  but  now  they 
clasped  themselves  behind  his  head.  Her  vision  of  him  had 
swum  away  in  a  blur,  and  without  the  support  she  got  from 
him  she'd  have  been  swaying  giddily. 

"Eoddy,  old  man,"  she  said,  "if  I  hadn't  seen — in  the  first 
— ten  minutes,  the  thing  you — meant  so  hard  I  shouldn't  see 
—I  think  it  would  have — killed  me.  If  I  hadn't  seen  that 
you  loved  me — after  all ;  after  everything.  After  all  the  tor 
tures  you'd  suffered,  through  me.  Because  that's  all  I  want 
— in  the  world." 

At  that  he  put  his  arms  around  her  and  pulled  her  up  to 
him.  But  the  manner  of  it  was  so  different  from  his  old  em- 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  551 

braces  that  presently  she  drew  him  around  so  that  what  little 
light  there  was  fell  on  his  face,  and  searched  it  thoughtfully. 

"You  do  believe  me,  Roddy,  don't  you — that  there  isn't  any 
pity  about  it  ?  There  isn't  any  room  for  pity.  There's  noth 
ing  in  me  at  all  but  just  a  great  big — want  of  you.  Don't 
you  understand  that  ?" 

He  did  understand  it  with  his  mind,  but  he  was  a  little 
dazed,  like  one  who  has  stood  too  near  where  the  lightning 
struck.  The  hope  he  had  kept  buried  alive  so  long — buried 
alive  because  it  wouldn't  die — could  not  be  brought  out  into 
a  blinding  glory  like  this  without  shrinking — pain — exquisite 
terrifying  pain. 

The  knowledge  she  had  acquired  by  her  own  suffering  stood 
her  in  good  stead  now.  She  did  not  mistake,  as  the  Rose  he 
had  married  might  have  done,  the  weakness  of  his  response 
for  coldness — indifference. 

She  went  back  and  began  making  love  to  him  more  gently ; 
released  herself  from  his  arms,  led  him  over  to  her  one  big 
chair,  and  made  him  sit  down  in  it,  settled  herself  upon  the 
arm  of  it  and  contented  herself  with  one  of  his  hands.  Pres 
ently  he  took  one  of  hers,  bent  his  face  down  over  it  and 
brushed  the  back  of  it  with  his  lips. 

The  timidity  of  that  caress,  with  all  it  revealed  to  her,  was 
too  much  for  her.  She  swallowed  one  sob,  and  another,  but 
the  next  one  got  away  from  her  and  she  broke  out  in  a  pas 
sionate  fit  of  weeping. 

That  roused  him  from  his  daze  a  little,  and  he  pulled  her 
down  in  his  arms — held  her  tight — comforted  her. 

When  she  got  herself  in  hand  again,  she  got  up,  went  away 
to  wash  her  face,  and  coming  back  in  the  room  again,  lighted 
a  reading-lamp  and  drew  down  the  blinds. 

"Rose/'  he  said  presently,  "what  are  we  going  to  do  ?" 

She  knew  she  was  not  answering  the  true  intent  of  his 
question  when  she  said : 

"Well,  for  one  thing  we  can  get  a  little  supper.  I  don't 
know  what  we've  got  to  eat,  but  we  won't  care — to-night." 

There  was  a  ring  of  decision  in  his  voice  that  startled  her  a 
little  when  he  said : 


553  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

"No,  we  won't  do  that  to-night.  We'll  go  out  somewhere  to 
a  restaurant." 

Their  eyes  met — unwavering. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  "that's  what  we'll  do." 

They  didn't  talk  much  across  the  table  in  the  deserted  little 
Italian  restaurant  they  went  to.  Neither  of  them  afterward 
could  remember  anything  they'd  said.  They  ate  their  meal 
in  a  sort  of  grave  contented  happiness  that  was  reaching 
down  deeper  and  deeper  into  them  every  minute,  and  they 
walked  back  to  the  gray  brick  building  in  Thirteenth  Street, 
arm  in  arm,  hand  in  hand,  in  silence.  But  when  she  stopped 
there,  he  said : 

"Let's  walk  a  little  farther,  Eose.  There  are  things  we've 
got  to  decide,  and — and  I'm  not  going  in  with  you  again 
to-night." 

She  caught  her  breath  at  that,  and  her  hand  tightened  its 
hold  on  his.  But  she  walked  on  with  him. 

He  said,  presently,  "You  understand,  don't  you  ?" 

She  answered,  "Oh,  my  dear ! — yes."  But  she  added,  a 
little  shakily,  "I  wish  we  had  a  magic-carpet  right  here,  that 
we  could  fly  home  on." 

Then  they  walked  a  while  in  silence. 

At  last  he  said:  "There's  this  we  can  do.  I  can  go  back 
to  my  hotel  to-night,  and  tell  them  that  I'm  expecting  you 
— that  I'm  expecting  my  wife  to  join  me  there.  To-morrow  ? 
And  then  I  can  come  and  get  you  and  bring  you  there.  It's 
not  home,  and  it's  not  the  place  I'd  choose  for — for  a  honey 
moon,  but  .  .  ." 

The  way  she  echoed  the  word  set  him  thinking.  But  before 
his  thoughts  had  got  to  their  destination  she  said : 

"Shall  we  make  it  a  real  honeymoon,  Eoddy — make  it  as 
complete  as  we  can  ?  Forget  everything  and  let  all  the  world 
be  ..." 

He  supplied  a  word  for  her,  "Eose-color  ?" 

She  accepted  it  with  a  caressing  little  laugh,  ".  .  .  for 
a  while  ?" 

"That's  what  I  was  fumbling  for,"  he  said,  "but  I  can't 
think  very  straight  to-night.  I've  got  it  now,  though.  That 


COULEUR-DE-ROSE  553 

cottage  we  had — before  the  twins  were  born — down  on  the 
Cape.  There  won't  be  a  soul  there  this  time  of  the  year. 
We'd  have  the  world  to  ourselves." 

"Yes"  she  said,  "for  a  little  while,  we'd  Avant  it  like  that. 
But  after  a  while — after  a  day  or  two,  could  we  have  the 
babies?  Could  the  nurse  bring  them  on  to  me  and  then  go 
straight  back,  so  that  I  could  have  them — and  you,  alto 
gether?" 

He  said,  "You  darling!"  But  he  couldn't  manage  more 
than  that. 

A  little  later  he  suggested  that  they  could  get  the  place  by 
telegraph  and  could  set  out  for  it  to-morrow. 

She  laughed  and  asked,  "Will  you  let  me  be  as  silly  as  I  like 
for  once  ?  Will  you  give  me  a  week — well,  till  Saturday ;  that 
would  do — to  get  ready  in?" 

"Get  ready  ?"  he  echoed. 

"Clothes  and  things,"  she  said.  "A — trousseau,  don't  you 
see?  I've  been  so  busy  making  clothes  for  other  people  that 
I've  got  just  about  nothing  myself.  And  I'd  like  .  .  .  But 
I  don't  really  care,  Roddy.  I'll  go  with  you  to-morrow,  'as  is/ 
if  you  want  me  to." 

"No,"  he  said.    "We'll  do  it  the  other  way/' 

And  then  he  took  her  back  to  the  gray  brick  entrance  and, 
just  out  of  range  of  the  elevator  man,  kissed  her  good  night. 

"But  will  you  telephone  to  me  as  soon  as  you  wake  up  in 
the  morning,  so  that  I'll  know  it's  true  ?" 

She  nodded.  Then  her  eyes  went  wide  and  she  clung  to 
him. 

"Is  it  true,  Roddy?  Is  it  possible  for  a  thing  to  come  back 
like  that?  Are  we  really  the  old  Rodney  and  Rose,  planning 
our  honeymoon  again?  It  wasn't  quite  three  years  ago. 
Three  years  next  month.  Will  it  be  like  that  ?" 

"Not  like  that,  perhaps,"  he  said,  "exactly.  It  will  be  better 
by  all  we've  learned  and  suffered  since." 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  BEGINNING 

THERE  was  a  sense  in  which  this  prediction  of  Eodney's 
about  their  honeymoon  was  altogether  true.  They  had  great 
hours — hours  of  an  emotional  intensity  greater  than  any  they 
had  known  during  that  former  honeymoon,  greater  by  all  they 
had  learned  and  suffered  since — hours  that  repaid  all  that  suf 
fering,  and  could  not  have  been  captured  at  any  smaller  price. 
There  were  hours  when  the  whole  of  their  two  selves  literally 
seemed  transfused  into  one  essence;  when  there  was  nothing 
of  either  of  them  that  was  not  the  other;  when  all  their 
thoughts,  impulses,  desires,  flowered  spontaneously  out  of  a 
common  mind.  There  was  no  precalculating  these  experi 
ences.  They  came  upon  them,  seized  them,  carried  them  off. 

One  of  these,  that  neither  of  them  will  ever  forget,  came  at 
the  end  of  a  long  tramp  through  the  dawn  of  their  second 
day.  They  had  been  swinging  along  in  almost  unbroken 
silence  through  the  gray  mist,  had  mounted  a  little  hillock 
and  halted,  hand  in  hand,  as  the  first  lance  of  sunlight  trans 
fixed  and  flushed  the  still  vaporous  air,  and  it  had  seemed  to 
them,  as  they  watched,  breathless,  while  the  sun  mounted, 
that  the  whole  of  the  life  that  lay  before  them  was  a  track  of 
gold  like  that  which  blazed  across  the  sea,  leading  to  an  in 
tolerable  glory. 

And  there  were  other  hours  of  equally  memorable  trans 
figuration,  which  their  surroundings  had  nothing  whatever  to 
do  with — hours  lighted  only  by  the  flame  that  flared  up  from 
their  two  selves. 

But  life,  of  course,  can  not  be  made  up  of  hours  like  that. 
No  sane  person  can  even  want  to  live  in  a  perpetual  ecstasy. 
What  makes  a  mountain  peak  is  the  fall  away  into  the  sur 
rounding  valleys. 

554 


THE    BEGINNING  555 

In  their  valleys  of  commonplace,  every-day  existence — and 
these  occurred  even  in  their  first  days  together — they  were 
stiff,  shy,  self-conscious  with  each  other.  And  their  attempt 
to  ignore  this  fact  only  made  the  self-consciousness  the  worse. 
It  troubled  and  bewildered  both  of  them. 

Rose's  misgiving  had  been  justified.  They  weren't  the  old 
Eodney  and  Eose.  Those  two  splendid  careless  savages,  who 
had  lived  for  a  fortnight  on  an  island  in  the  midst  of  Martin 
Whitney's  carefully  preserved  solitude  in  Northern  "Wisconsin, 
accepting  the  gifts  of  the  gods  with  such  joyous  confidence 
that  none  of  them  could  ever  turn  bitter,  those  two  zestful 
children,  had  ceased  to  exist. 

John  Galbraith  had  spoken  truth  when  he  said  there  was  no 
such  thing  as  a  fresh  start.  For  good  or  evil,  you  were  the 
product  of  your  yesterdays.  The  nightmare  tour  on  the  road 
with  The  Girl  Up-stairs  company  was  a  part  of  Eose ;  the  day 
in  Centropolis,  the  night  when  Galbraith  had  made  love  to 
her.  The  hour  in  the  University  Club,  when  Eodney's  heart 
had  first  shrunk  from  an  unacknowledged  fear;  the  days  and 
weeks  of  humiliation  and  distress  that  had  succeeded  it,  were 
a  part  of  him — an  ineffaceable  part. 

So  it  was  natural  enough — though  not,  therefore,  the  less 
distressing — that  Eose  should  note,  with  wonder,  a  tendency 
in  him  to  revert  to  the  manner  which  had  characterized  his 
first  call  on  her  in  New  York ;  a  tendency  to  be— of  all  things 
— polite.  He  didn't  swear  any  more,  nor  contradict.  He 
chose  his  words,  got  up  when  she  did,  picked  up  things  she 
dropped.  And  when  she  was  quite  sure  she  was  safe  from 
discovery,  she  sometimes  wept  forlornly,  for  the  rough,  out 
rageous,  absent-minded,  imperious  lover  of  the  old  days. 

She  did  not  know  that  she  was  different  too — as  remote 
from  the  girl  she  had  been  during  the  first  six  months  of  their 
marriage — the  girl  who,  "all  eyes/'  had  held  her  breath  while 
Doctor  Eandolph  told  her  things;  the  girl  who  had  smiled 
over  Bertie  Willis'  love-making,  because  she  didn't  know  that 
such  things  happened  except  in  books — as  he  was  from  the 
old  Eodney.  Even  Violet  had  seen,  in  the  glimpse  she'd 
caught  across  two  taxicabs,  that  her  smile  was  somehow  dif- 


556  THE   REAL   ADVBNTUBB 

ferent,  and  James  Randolph  had  come  back  from  his  tea  with 
her  in  the  Knickerbocker,  saying  that  she  was  a  thousand 
years  old. 

So  it  was  not  wonderful  that  Rodney  should  have  found  a 
new  mystery  in  her;  nor  that,  seeing  in  her  look,  sometimes 
— especially  when  it  was  not  meeting  his  own — the  reflections 
of  a  thousand  experiences  he  had  not  shared  with  her,  he 
should  have  felt  that  she  was  a  long  way  off.  And  his  heart 
ached  for  the  old  Rose,  whom  he  had  so  completely  "sur 
rounded" — the  Rose  who  had  consulted  him  about  the  menus 
for  her  dinners,  who  had  brought  him  all  her  little  troubles ; 
who  had  tried — bless  her ! — to  study  law,  and  had  stolen  into 
court  to  hear  his  argument,  so  that  she  could  talk  with  him. 
Whatever  the  future  might  have  for  him,  it  would  never 
bring  that  Rose  back. 

The  arrival  of  the  twins,  in  the  convoy  of  a  badly  flustered 
— and,  to  tell  the  truth,  a  somewhat  scandalized — Miss 
French,  simplified  the  situation  a  little — by  complicating 
it!  They  absolutely  enforced  a  routine.  They  had  needs 
that  must  be  met  on  the  minute.  And  they  gave  Rose  and 
Rodney  so  many  occupations  that  the  contemplation  of  their 
complicated  states  of  mind  was  much  abridged. 

But  even  her  babies  brought  Rose  a  disappointment  along 
with  them.  From  the  time  of  the  receipt  of  Miss  French's 
telegram  acknowledging  Rodney's  and  telling  them  what  train 
she  and  the  twins  would  take,  Rose  had  been  telling  off  the 
hours  in  mounting  excitement.  The  two  utterly  adorable 
little  creatures,  as  the  pictures  of  them  in  Rodney's  pocket- 
book  showed  them  to  be,  who  were,  miraculously — incredibly — 
hers,  were  coming  to  bring  motherhood  to  her ;  a  long-deferred 
payment  for  the  labor  and  the  agony  with  which  she  had 
borne  them ;  the  realization  of  half -forgotten  hopes  that  had, 
during  the  period  of  her  pregnancy,  been  the  mainstay  of  her 
life.  There  was  now  no  Mrs.  Ruston,  no  Harriet,  no  plausible 
physician  to  keep  them  away  from  her.  Rose  had  a  smile  of 
tender  pity  for  the  memory  of  the  girl  who  had  struggled  so 
ineffectually  and  yet  with  such  heart-breaking  earnestness  te 
break  the  filaments  of  the  web  they'd  spun  around  her. 


THE   BEGINNING  557 

No,  it  wouldn't  be  like  that  now.  Rodney  had  agreed  ex 
plicitly  that  Miss  French  was  to  be  allowed  to  stay  only  as 
long  as  Rose  wanted  her;  only  for  the  few  days — or  hours — 
she  would  need  for  making  herself  mistress  of  their  regime. 
Then  the  nurse  was  to  be  sent  away  on  a  vacation  and  Rose 
should  have  her  children  to  herself. 

She  didn't  go  to  Boston  with  Rodney  to  meet  them;  nor 
even  to  the  station;  stayed  in  the  cottage,  ostensibly  to  see  to 
it,  up  to  the  very  last  minute,  that  the  fires  were  right  (June 
had  come  in  cold  and  rainy)  and  in  general  to  be  ready  on  the 
moment  to  produce  anything  that  their  rather  unforeseeable 
needs  might  call  for.  Her  real  reason  was  a  shrinking  from 
having  her  first  meeting  with  them  in  the  confusion  of  ar 
rival  on  a  station  platform,  under  the  eyes  of  the  world,  amid 
the  distractions  of  things  like  luggage. 

Rodney  understood  this  well  enough,  and  arriving  at  the 
cottage,  he  clambered  out  of  the  wagon  with  them  and  carried 
them  both  straight  in  to  Rose,  leaving  the  nurse  and  the  be 
wildering  paraphernalia  of  travel  for  a  second  trip. 

Rose,  in  the  passionate  surge  of  gratified  desire  that  came 
with  the  sight  of  them,  caught  them  from  him,  crushed  them 
up  tight  against  her  breast — and  frightened  them  half  to 
death.  So  that  without  dissimulation,  they  howled  and 
brought  Miss  French  flying  to  the  rescue. 

Rose  didn't  make  a  tragedy  of  it;  managed  a  smile  at  her 
self,  though  she  suspected  she'd  cry  when  she  got  the  chance, 
and  subjected  her  ideas  to  an  instantaneous  revision.  They 
were — persons,  those  two  funnily  indignant  little  mites,  with 
their  own  ideas,  their  own  preferences,  and  the  perfectly  ade 
quate  conviction  of  being  entitled  to  them.  How  would  she 
herself  have  liked  it,  to  have  a  total  stranger,  fifteen  feet  high 
or  so,  snatch  at  her  like  that? 

She  was  rather  apologetic  all  day,  and  got  her  reward; 
especially  from  the  boy,  who  was  an  adventurous  and  rather 
truculent  baby,  much  she  fancied,  as  his  father  must  once 
have  been,  and  who  took  to  her  more  quickly  than  the  girl  did. 
Indeed,  the  second  Rodney  fell  in  love  with  her  almost  as 
promptly  as  his  father  had  done  before  him.  But  little  Portia 


558  THE    REAL   ADVENTURE 

wasn't  very  far  behind.  Two  days  sufficed  for  the  conquest  of 
the  pair  of  them. 

The  really  disquieting  discovery  awaited  the  time  when  the 
wire-edge  of  novelty  about  this  adventure  in  motherhood  had 
worn  off;  when  she  could  bathe  them,  dress  them,  feed  them 
their  very  strictly  regimented  meals,  without  being  spurred 
to  the  highest  pitch  of  alertness  by  the  fear  of  making  a  mis 
take — forgetting  something,  like  the  juice  of  a  half  orange 
at  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning,  the  omission  of  which  might 
have — who  knew  what  disastrous  consequences ! 

That  attitude  can't  last  any  woman  long,  and  Eose,  with 
her  wonderfully  clever  hands,  her  wits  trained — as  the  wits 
of  persons  who  had  worked  for  John  Galbraith  were  always 
trained — not  to  be  told  the  same  thing  twice,  her  pride  keep 
ing  in  sharp  focus  the  determination  that  Rodney  should  see 
that  she  could  be  as  good  a  nurse  as  Miss  French — Rose  wore 
off  that  nervous  tenseness  over  her  new  job  very  quickly. 
Within  a  week  she  had  a  routine  established  that  was  noiseless 
— frictionless. 

But  do  you  remember  how  aghast  she  was  over  the  forty 
weeks  John  Galbraith  had  talked  about  as  the  probable  run 
of  The  Girl  Up-stairs;  her  consternation  over  the  idea  of  just 
going  on  doing  the  same  thing  over  and  over  again,  "around 
and  round,  like  a  horse  at  the  end  of  a  pole"  ?  What  she  would 
like  to  do,  she  had  told  him,  now  that  this  was  done,  was  to 
begin  on  something  else. 

Well,  it  was  with  something  the  same  feeling  of  consterna 
tion  that,  having  thrown  herself  heart  and  soul  into  the  task 
of  planning  and  setting  in  motion  a  routine  for  two  year- 
and-a-half-old  babies,  she  found  herself  straightening  up  and 
saying  "What  next?"  And  realizing,  that  as  far  as  this  job 
was  concerned,  there  was  no  "next."  The  supreme  merit  of 
her  care,  from  now  on,  would  be — barring  emergencies — the 
placid  continuation  of  that  routine.  There  were  no  heroics 
about  motherhood — save  in  emergency,  once  more.  It  was  a 
question  of  remembering  a  hundred  trivial  details,  and  exe 
cuting  them  in  the  same  way  every  day.  It  was  a  question 
of  doing  a  thousand  little  services,  not  one  of  which  was  seri- 


THE   BEGINNING  559 

ous  enough  to  occupy  her  mind,  every  one  of  which  was  capa 
ble  of  being  done  almost  automatically — but  not  quite !  The 
whole  of  the  attention  was  never  quite  taken,  and  yet  it  was 
never,  all  the  way  around  the  clock,  entirely  left  free.  And 
her  love  for  them,  which  had  become  almost  as  intense  and 
overmastering  a  thing  as  her  love  for  her  husband,  could 
never  be  expressed  fully,  as  was  her  love  for  him.  It  would 
be  cruelly  unfair,  she  recognized  that,  to  emotionalize  over 
them — force  them. 

It  was  a  fine  relation.  It  was,  perhaps,  the  very  finest  in 
the  world.  But  as  a  job,  it  wasn't  so  satisfactory.  Four- 
fifths  of  it,  anyway,  could  be  done  with  better  results  for  the 
children  by  a  placid,  unimaginative,  tolerably  stupid  person, 
who  had  no  stronger  feeling  for  them  than  the  mild  tunpo- 
rary  affection  they  could  excite  in  any  one  not  a  me  n^ter. 
And  the  other  fifth  of  it  wasn't  strictly  a  job  at  all. 

On  the  whole,  then,  leaving  their  miraculous  hours  out  of 
the  account — and,  being  incommensurable,  imponderable, 
they  couldn't  be  included  in  an  inventory — their  honeymoon, 
considered  as  an  attempt  to  revisit  Arcady,  to  seize  a  golden 
day  that  looked  neither  toward  the  past  nor  toward  the  future, 
complete  in  itself,  perfect — was  a  failure. 

It  was  not  until,  pretty  ruefully,  they  acknowledged  this, 
tore  up  their  artificial  resolution  not  to  look  at  the  future, 
and  deliberately  set  themselves  to  the  contemplation  of  a  life 
that  would  have  to  take  into  account  complex  and  baffling 
considerations,  that  their  honeymoon  became  a  success.  It 
was  well  along  in  their  month  that  this  happened. 

Rose  had  spent  a  maddening  sort  of  day,  a  day  that  had 
been  all  edges,  trying  not  to  let  herself  feel  hurt  over  fantastic 
secondary  meanings  which  it  was  possible  to  attach  to  some 
of  the  things  Rodney  had  said,  trying  to  be  cheerful  and 
sensible,  and  to  ignore  the  patent  fact  that  his  cheerfulness 
was  as  forced  and  unnatural  a  thing  as  hers.  The  children 
— as  a  rule  the  best-behaved  little  things  in  the  world — had 
been  refractory.  They'd  refused  to  take  their  morning  nap 
for  some  reason  or  other,  and  had  been  fractious  ever  since. 
So,  after  their  supper,  when  they'd  finally  gone  off  to  sleep, 


560  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

and  Rose  had  rejoined  Rodney  in  the  sitting-room,  she  was  in 
a  state  where  it  did  not  take  much  to  set  her  off. 

It  was  not  much  that  did;  nothing  more,  indeed,  than  the 
fact  that  she  found  her  husband  brooding  in  front  of  the  fire, 
and  that  the  smile  with  which  he  greeted  her  was  a  little  too 
quick  and  bright  and  mechanical,  and  that  it  soon  faded  out. 
The  Rodney  of  her  memories  had  never  done  things  like  that. 
If  you  found  him  sitting  in  a  chair,  you  found  him  reading 
a  book.  When  he  was  thinking  something  out  he  tramped 
back  and  forth,  twisted  his  face  up,  made  gestures !  That 
habit  couldn't  have  changed.  It  was  just  that  he  wasn't  being 
natural  with  her !  Couldn't  feel  at  home  with  her !  Before 
she  knew  it,  she  was  crying. 

He  asked,  in  consternation,  what  the  matter  was.  What 
had  happened  ? 

"Nothing,"  she  said.    "Absolutely  nothing.    Really." 

"Then  it's  just — that  you're  not  happy.  With  me,  like 
this."  He  brought  that  out  gravely,  a  word  at  a  time;  as 
though  they  hurt. 

"Are  you  happy  ?    With  me — like  this  ?"  she  countered. 

It  was  a  question  he  could  not  answer  categorically  and  she 
did  not  give  him  time  for  anything  else.  "What's  the  matter 
with  us,  Roddy?"  she  demanded.  "We  ought  to  be  happy. 
We  meant  to  be.  We  said  that  we'd  been  through  a  lot,  and 
that  probably  there  was  a  lot  more  to  go  through — in  the 
way  of  working  things  out,  at  least — and  that  we'd  take  a 
month  just  for  nothing  but  to  be  happy  in — just  for  pure 
joy."  Her  voice  broke  in  a  sob  over  that.  "And  here  we  are 
—like  this!" 

"It  hasn't  all  been  like  this,"  he  said.  "There  have  been 
hours,  a  day  or  two,  that  I'd  go  through  the  whole  thing  for, 
again,  if  necessary." 

She  nodded  assent  to  that.  "But  the  rest  of  the  time!" 
she  cried.  "Why  can't  we  be — comfortable  together?  Why 
.  .  .  Roddy,  why  can't  you  be  natural  with  me  ?  Like  your 
old  self.  Why  don't  you  roar  at  me  any  more?  And  swear 
when  you  run  into  things  ?  I've  never  seen  you  formal  before 


THE    BEGINNING  561 

— not  with  anybody.  Not  even  with  strangers.  And  now 
you're  formal  with  me." 

The  rueful  grin  with  which  he  acknowledged  the  truth  of 
this  indictment  was  more  like  him,  and  it  cheered  her  im 
mensely.  She  answered  it  with  one  of  her  own,  dried  her 
eyes  and  asked  again,  more  collectedly : 

"Well,  can  you  tell  me  why?" 

"Why,  it  seemed  to  me,"  he  said,  "that  it  was  you  who  were 
different.  And  you  have  changed,  of  course,  down  inside, 
more  than  I  have.  You've  been  through  things  in  the  last 
year  and  a  half;  found  out  things  that  I  know  nothing  about, 
except  as  I  have  read  about  them  in  books.  I've  never  had 
to  a?k  a  stranger  for  a  job.  I've  never  been — brought  to  bay, 
the  way  you  were  in  that  damned  town  of  Centropolis  (I'd 
like  to  burn  it).  And  other  things — horrible  things,  have 
— have  come  so  near  }rou,  that  if  it  hadn't  been  for  that — 
white  flame  of  yours,  they'd  have  marked  you.  When  I  think 
of  those  things  I  feel  like  a  schoolboy  beside  you.  You've  no 
idea  how — how  innocent  a  man  can  be,  Eose.  That's  not 
the  tradition,  but  it's  true.  So,  when  I  remember  how  things 
used  to  be  between  us,  how  I  used  to  be  the  one  who  knew 
things,  and  how  I  preached  and  spouted,  I  get  to  feeling  that 
the  man  you  remember  must  look  to  you  now,  like — well,  like 
a  schoolboy.  Showing  off." 

She  stared  at  him  incredulously.  "But  that's  downright 
morbid,"  she  said.  "You  don't  have  to  go — into  the  gutter 
to  learn  things.  And  what  you  say  about  innocence  .  .  . 
A  man  can't  keep  his  innocence  by  being  ignorant,  Eoddy. 
If  he's  kept  it,  he  must  have — fought  for  it.  I  know  that." 

She  was  still  deeply  disturbed.  "It's  horrible  that  I  should 
make  you  feel  like  that,"  she  concluded. 

"It  isn't  you,"  he  told  her.  "It's  just — the  situation.  I 
can't  help  feeling  that  I'm  taken — on  approval.  Oh,  it's  got 
to  be  like  that !  There  are  things  that,  with  all  the  forgive 
ness  in  the  world,  you  can't  forget.  And  until  you  have  seen 
that  I  am  different,  that  I  have  made  myself  different  .  .  ." 

"What  things  ?"  she  demanded. 


562  THE    REAL    ADVENTURE 

"Well — a  thing,"  he  amended.  "You  know  what  I  mean. 
The  night  I  came  to  the  stage  door  of  the  Globe  for  you." 

She  colored  at  that,  and  then,  to  his  amazement,  she  smiled. 

"I've  been  such  a  coward  about  that,"  she  said.  "I've  tried 
to  tell  you  a  dozen  times  up  here,  and  I've  been  afraid  you'd 
be — shocked.  I  expect  you  will  be,  now.  But  I've  got  to  tell 
you  just  the  same. 

"Roddy,  when  you  were  talking  to  me,  there  in  the  hotel 
at  Dubuque,  telling  me  how  horrified  you  were  over  that,  it 
came  over  me  all  at  once  that  I  had  nothing  to  forgive ;  that 
if  the  thing  was  a  fault  at  all,  it  was  mine  as  much  as  yours, 
and  that  it  wasn't  so  much  of  a  fault  as  an — accident.  You 
couldn't  help  hating  me,  and  you  couldn't  help  loving  me. 
And  you  did  both  at  once.  And  I,  when  I  could  have  told 
you  something  that  would  have  made  you — well,  hate  me 
less,  anyhow— didn't  take  the  trouble.  I  said  to  myself  then 
that  it  was  too  bad  it  happened,  but  that  it  wasn't,  at  least, 
your  fault.  And  I  was  afraid  to  tell  you  so. 

"But,  Eoddy,  during  these  last  months,  down  here  in  New 
York,  I've  been — glad  it  happened.  It's  been  something  to 
hold  on  to,  that  your  love  of  me  was  strong  enough,  so  that 
the  hate  couldn't  kill  it.  It  helped  me  to  hope  that  it  would 
be  strong  enough,  some  day  or  other,  to  bring  you  back  to 
me.  And  without  that  hope,  I  couldn't  have  gone  on.  It's 
what  I  have  lived  on.  The  only  thing  that  any  of  my — suc 
cesses  has  meant  has  been  that  perhaps  it  brought  that 
nearer." 

She  gave  a  shaky  laugh.  "On  approval !"  Her  eyes  filled 
again.  "Eoddy,  you  can't  mean  that." 

She  came  over  and  sat  down  in  his  lap,  and  slid  her  arm 
around  his  neck. 

"This  is  where  we'll  begin!"  she  said.  "That  I'll  never 
— whatever  happens — walk  out  on  you  again.  Whether  things 
go  well  or  badly  with  us,  we'll  work  it  out,  somehow,  together." 

It  was  not  until  she  heard  the  long  shuddering  sigh  he  drew 
at  that,  and  felt  him  go  limp  under  her,  that  she  realized  how 
genuine  his  fear  had  been — the  perfectly  preposterous  fear 
that  if  their  new  experiment  didn't  come  up  to  her  anticipa- 


THE   BEGINNING  563 

tion  she'd  tell  him  so,  and  leave  him  once  more.  This  time 
for  good. 

It  was  a  good  while  before  they  took  up  a  rational  discus 
sion  again,  but  at  last  she  said : 

"It  will  take  working  out,  though.  "We've  been  shirking 
that.  Hadn't  we  better  begin?" 

He  assented.  "Only,  you'll  have  to  get  up/'  he  said,  "and 
sit  down  somewhere  else.  Out  of  reach." 

She  smiled  as  she  obeyed  him.  "It's  hard  for  a  woman  to 
remember,"  she  said,  "that  a  man  can't  think  about  other 
things  when  he's  making  love,  and  can't  think  about  the  per 
son  he's  in  love  with  when  he's  doing  other  things.  Because, 
that's  about  the  easiest  thing  a  woman  does." 

She  saw  by  the  expression  that  went  over  his  face  that  her 
remark  had  chilled  him  a  little.  He  didn't  like  to  think  of 
her  as  "a  woman,"  nor  as  of  his  relation  to  her  as  accounted 
for  by  the  fact  that  he  was  "a  man."  He'd  generalize  fast 
enough  about  the  world  at  large,  but  it  would  always  be  hard 
for  him  to  include  her  and  himself  in  his  generalizations. 

"Well,"  he  said  when  he'd  got  his  pipe  alight,  "it's  the  first 
question  I  asked  you  after — after  I  got  my  eyes  open :  What 
are  we  going  to  do  ?" 

"I  told  Alice  Perosini,"  she  said,  "the  day  before  we  left  to 
come  up  here,  that  I'd  come  back  in  a  month,  and  that  I'd 
stay  until  I'd  finished  all  the  work  that  we  were  contracted 
for.  I  felt  I  had  to  do  that.  It  would  have  been  so  beastly 
unfair  not  to.  You  understand,  don't  you  ?" 

"Of  course,"  he  said.  "You  couldn't  consider  anything 
else.  But  then  what  ?" 

"Then,"  she  said  after  a  silence,  "then,  if  it's  what  you  want 
me  to  do,  Roddy,  I'll  come  back  to  Chicago — for  good." 

"Give  up  your  business,  yon  mean  ?"  he  asked  quickly. 

She  nodded.  "It  can't  be  done  out  there,"  she  said.  "All 
the  big  productions  that  there's  any  money  in  are  made  in 
New  York.  I'll  come  back  and  just  be  your  wife.  I'll  keep 
your  house  and  mother  the  children,  and — what  was  it  you 
said  to  Gertrude? — maintain  your  status,  if  you  don't  think 
I'm  spoiled  for  that." 


564  THE    HEAL   ADVENTURE 

That  last  phrase,  though,  was  said  with  a  smile,  which  he 
answered  with  one  of  his  own  and  threw  in  in  parenthesis, 
"You  ought  to  hear  Violet  go  on,  and  Constance."  But  with 
an  instant  return  to  seriousness,  he  said : 

"I've  not  asked  that,  Eose.    I  wouldn't  dream  of  asking  it !" 

"I  know,"  she  said.  "It's  a  thing  I'm  glad  you  let  me  give 
— unasked.  But  I  mean  it,  Eoddy.  I've  meant  it  from  the 
first,  when  I  told  you  you  were  all  I  wanted.  There  wasn't 
any  string  tied  to  that." 

"I  know,"  he  said.  "But  all  the  same,  it  wouldn't  work, 
Rose." 

"There's  a  real  job  there,"  she  persisted,  "just  in  being 
successfully  the  wife  of  a  successful  man.  I  can  see  that  now. 
I  never  saw  it  when  it  was  my  job.  Hardly  caught  a  glimpse 
of  it.  I  didn't  even  see  my  bills;  let  you  pay  them  down  at 
the  office,  with  all  your  own  work  that  you  had  to  do." 

"It  wasn't  me,"  he  said.    "It  was  Miss  Beach." 

She  stared  at  that  and  gave  a  short  laugh.  "If  I'd  known 
that  .  .  .  !"  she  said. 

Then  she  came  back  to  the  point. 

"It  is  a  real  job,  and  I  think  I  could  learn  to  do  it  pretty 
well.  And  of  course  a  wife's  the  only  person  who  can  do  it 
properly." 

Still  he  shook  his  head.  But  he  hadn't,  as  yet,  any  rea 
soned  answer  to  make,  except  as  before,  that  it  wouldn't  work. 

"I  shouldn't  mind  the  money  end  of  it,"  she  said.  "I  mean 
living  on  yours.  I  know  I  can  earn  my  way,  and  I  know  you 
know  it.  So  that  wouldn't  matter.  I'd  never  feel  like  a  beg 
gar  again,  Roddy." 

"I  know,"  he  agreed.  "But  that  isn't  it.  It  isn't  a  ques 
tion  of  what  you'd  like  to  be,  or  are  willing  to  be.  It's  a  ques 
tion  of  what  you  are.  You're  something  more  than  just  my 
wife.  You've  got  certain  talents — certain  proved  capacities. 
That's  as  true  as  that  I  am  something  besides — just  your  hus 
band.  There  you  are!  Try  it  on  the  other  way  around. 
Suppose  I  should  offer  to  give  up  my  practise  and  come  down 
here  to  live  with  you — be  just  your  husband  and,  say,  your 
business  manager.  You  can  see  that  that's  preposterous.  Or, 


THE    BEGINNING  565 

for  that  matter,  we  could  both  quit.  I've  made  a  devil  of  a 
lot  of  money  lately.  I've  an  income  from  my  investments  of 
from  twenty-five  to  thirty  thousand  a  year  that  we  could  live 
on,  and  not  do  a  blessed  thing  but  be  husband  and  wife  to 
each  other.  Like  the  McCreas.  But  it  wouldn't  work.  You've 
got  to  be  what  you  are,  that's  the  point,  and  somehow  or 
other,  cut  your  life  to  fit.  I  expect  that's  one  of  the  things 
that's  been  the  trouble  with  us  down  here.  We've  both  been 
trying  so  damned  hard  to  be  something.  And  that  won't 
work." 

"What  will  work  then?"  she  asked.  And  this  was  a  ques 
tion  he  couldn't  answer. 

"We've  just  got  to  go  ahead,"  he  said  at  last,  "and  see  what 
happens.  Perhaps  you  can  work  it  out  so  that  you  can  do 
part  of  your  work  at  home.  We  could  move  the  nursery  and 
give  you  Florence's  old  studio.  And  then  it  would  do  if  you 
only  came  down  here  for  your  two  big  seasons — fall  and 
spring." 

"That  doesn't  seem  fair  to  you,"  she  protested.  "You  de 
serve  a  real  wife,  Eoddy;  not  somebody  dashing  in  and  dash 
ing  out." 

"I  don't  deserve  anything  I  can't  get,"  he  said.  "I'd  rather 
have  a  part  interest  in  you  than  to  possess,  lock,  stock  and 
barrel,  any  other  woman  I  can  think  of." 

She  came  back  to  him  again  and  settled  down  in  his  arms. 

"You  used  to  possess  me,  lock,  stock  and  barrel,"  she  said. 
"You  can  do  it  again,  if  you'll  say  the  word,  Rodney." 

He  shook  his  head.  "That's  just  what  I  can't  do,"  he  told 
her.  "That's  gone  and  we'll  never  get  it  back.  And  I  don't 
believe  I'd  have  it  back  if  I  could.  For  one  thing,  you  can't 
possess  without  being  possessed.  I  know  that  back  in  those 
days  you're  talking  about  I  used  to  try  to  fight  you  out  of 
my  thoughts.  Used  to  stay  down  late  at  the  office,  not  work 
ing,  just — trying  not  to  think  about  you.  Trying  to  save  out 
part  of  myself  from  being — saturated  with  you.  It  was  the 
fact  that  I  was  so  terribly  important  to  you  that  used  to  make 
me  feel  like  that;  the  fact  of  your— dependence — I  don't 
mean  for  money — on  me.  I  used  to  think — it  wasn't  your 


566  THE   EEAL   ADVENTURE 

lover  that  thought  that ;  it  was  the  other  man — that  it  would 
be  a  perfecly  wonderful  relief  to  me  if  you  could  just  get 
some  interest  that  left  me  out.  And  all  the  while  the  lover 
in  me  was  trying  to  have  all  of  you  there  was.  It's  a  hard 
thing  to  talk  sense  about." 

"A  man  told  me,"  Eose  said,  " — John  Galbraith  told  me, 
that  he  couldn't  be  a  woman's  friend  and  her  lover  at  the 
same  time,  any  more  than  a  steel  spring  could  be  made  soft 
so  that  it  would  bend  in  your  fingers  like  copper,  and  still 
be  a  spring.  He  said  that  was  true  of  him,  anyway,  and  he 
felt  sure  it  was  true  of  nine  men  out  of  a  dozen.  Do  you 
think  it's  true  ?  Have  we  got  to  decide  which  we'll  be  ?" 

""We  can't  decide,"  he  said  with  an  impatient  laugh. 
"That's  just  what  I've  been  telling  you.  We've  got  to  take 
what  we  can  get.  We've  got  to  work  out  the  relation  between 
ourselves  that  is  our  relation — the  Eose  and  Eodney  relation. 
It'll  probably  be  a  little  different  from  any  other.  There'll 
be  friendship  in  it,  and  there'll  be  love  in  it.  Imagine  our 
'deciding'  that  we  wouldn't  be  lovers !  But  I  guess  that  what 
Galbraith  said  was  true  to  this  extent :  that  each  of  those  will 
be  more  or  less  at  the  expense  of  the  other.  It  won't  spring 
quite  so  well,  and  it  will  bend  a  little." 

She  was  still  disposed  to  rebel  at  this  conclusion.  "I  don't 
see  why  it  has  to  be  that  way,"  she  insisted.  "Why  it  can't  be 
a  perfect  thing  instead  of  just  a  compromise.  Why  being 
friends  and  partners  shouldn't  make  us  better  lovers,  and 
why  being  lovers  shouldn't  make  us  better  friends." 

"Like  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,"  he  murmured.  "  'Three 
in  one;  one  in  three.  Without  confounding  the  persons  nor 
dividing  the  substance.'  It's  a  wonderful  idea,  certainly." 

"Well,  then,"  she  demanded,  "isn't  it  what  we  ought  to  try 
for  ?  The  very  best  there  is  ?" 

"That's  what  they  tell  us,"  he  admitted.  "'Aim  high,' 
they  say.  I'm  not  sure  it  isn't  better  sense  to  aim  at  some 
thing  you  can  hit.  Why,  look  at  us,  these  last  three  weeks ! 
We  said  we  were  going  to  have  a  month  of  pure  happiness. 
One  hundred  per  cent.  pure.  We  waked  up  every  morning 


THE    BEGINNING  567 

telling  ourselves  we'd  got  to  be  happy,  and  we  made  ourselves 
miserable  every  night  wondering  if  we'd  been  happy  enough." 

"I'm  glad  you  were  miserable,  too,"  she  said.  "I  was  so 
ashamed  of  myself  for  being." 

After  a  while  he  said,  "Here's  what  we've  got  to  build  on : 
Whatever  else  it  may  or  may  not  be,  this  relation  between  us 
is  a  permanent  thing.  We've  lived  with  each  other  and  without 
each  other,  and  we  know  which  we  want.  If  we  find  it  has  its 
limitations  and  drawbacks  we  needn't  worry.  Just  go  ahead 
and  make  the  best  of  it  we  can.  There's  no  law  that  decrees 
we've  got  to  be  happy.  When  we  are  happy  it'll  be  so  much 
to  the  good.  And  when  we  aren't  .  .  ." 

She  gave  a  contented  little  laugh  and  cuddled  closer  down 
against  him.  "You  talk  like  Solomon  in  all  his  solemnity," 
she  said.  "But  you  can't  imagine  that  we're  going  to  be 
unhappy.  Really." 

His  answer  was  that  perhaps  he  couldn't  imagine  it,  but 
that  he  knew  it,  just  the  same.  "Even  an  ordinary  marriage 
isn't  any  too  easy;  a  marriage,  I  mean,  where  it's  quite  well 
understood  which  of  the  parties  to  it  shall  always  submit  to 
the  other;  and  which  of  them  is  the  important  one  who's 
always  to  have  the  right  of  way.  There's  generally  something 
perfectly  unescapable  that  decides  that  question.  But  with 
us  there  isn't.  So  the  question  who's  got  to  give  in  will  have 
to  be  decided  on  its  merits  every  time  a  difference  arises." 

She  burlesqued  a  look  of  extreme  apprehension.  She  was 
deeply  and  utterly  content  with  life  just  then.  But  he 
wouldn't  be  diverted. 

"There's  another  reason,"  he  went  on.  "I've  a  notion  that 
the  thing  we're  after  is  about  the  finest  thing  there  is.  If 
that's  so,  we'll  have  to  pay  for  it,  in  one  way  or  another.  But 
we  aren't  going  to  worry  about  it.  We'll  just  go  ahead — and 
see  what  happens." 

"Do  you  remember  when  you  said  that  before  ?"  asked  Eose. 
"You  told  me  that  marriage  was  an  adventure  anyway,  and 
that  the  only  thing  to  do  was  to  try  it — and  see  what  hap 
pened." 


568  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

He  grunted.    "The  real  adventure's  just  begun,"  he  said. 
"Anyhow,"  she  murmured  drowsily,  "you  can  talk  to  me 
again.    Just  as  if  we  weren't  married." 

And  there  is  just  about  where  they  stand  to-day — at  the 
beginning,  or  hardly  past  the  beginning,  of  what  he  spoke  of 
as  their  real  adventure;  they  are  going  forward  prepared  to 
make  the  best  of  it  and  see  what  happens. 

What  did  happen  within  two  or  three  days  after  this  last 
conversation  of  theirs  that  I  have  chronicled  was  that  Eose 
went  back  with  Eodney  and  the  twins  to  Chicago,  stayed  there 
only  until  Miss  French  could  be  summoned  back  from  her 
vacation,  and  then  went  on  to  New  York  to  a  badly  worried 
Alice  and  the  now  extremely  urgent  affairs  of  Dane  &  Com 
pany. 

Summer  is  a  slack  time  for  a  lawyer,  of  course,  since  judges 
are  gentlemen  who  like  long  vacations.  So  Eodney  persuaded 
Eose  to  take  a  bigger  apartment  in  the  same  building  and  to 
put  a  card  in  the  mail-box  that  would  account  for  him  as 
well  as  for  herself.  He  came  down  pretty  often,  and  always 
had,  it  must  be  owned,  a  rather  hard  time  of  it.  The  spectacle 
of  Eose  driving  along  an  ungodly  number  of  hours  a  day  while 
he  idled  about  doing  nothing  was  one  he  found  it  hard  to  get 
used  to.  It  didn't  altogether  reconcile  him  to  it  to  have  her 
point  out  that  there  were  times  when  he  drove  like  that.  They 
had  two  or  three  good  Sundays,  though;  one  of  them  out  on 
Long  Island  with  John  Galbraith — a  meeting  and  the  begin 
ning  of  a  friendship  that  Eose  had  been  very  keen  to  bring 
about. 

Her  work  ended  with  a  terrific  climax  in  September,  just 
about  as  his  began,  and  Eos3  came  back  to  Chicago,  spent  a 
joyous  month  with  the  twins  and  with  the  little  of  Eodney 
his  office  could  spare  of  him.  Then,  taking  the  babies  and 
their  nurse  with  her,  she  went  out  to  California  to  see  her 
mother  and  Portia. 

Without  any  special  incentive,  just  the  natural  desire  of  a 
daughter  and  a  sister  for  reunion  after  so  long  a  parting 
would  have  taken  her  there. 


THE    BEGINNING  569 

But  Eose  had  a  special  incentive.  She  wanted  to  talk  to 
Portia.  They  hadn't  had  a  real  talk  since  that  devastating 
day — ages  ago — when,  yielding  to  an  impulse  of  passionate 
self-revelation,  Portia  had  exhibited  her  great  sacrifice  and 
her  equally  great,  though  thwarted  desire;  had  said  to  Eose, 
"I  am  the  branch  they  cut  off  so  that  you  could  grow.  You're 
living  my  life  as  well  as  yours.  The  only  thing  I  ever  could 
hate  you  for  would  be  for  failing."  She  wanted  to  tell 
Portia  how  the  life  she  had  given  up  the  chance  of  living  had 
grown  in  her  sister's  trust.  She  wanted  Portia's,  "Well  done." 

Also,  as  a  practical  matter  of  justice,  she  wanted  to  repay, 
as  far  as  money  could  repay — what  Portia,  at  such  a  cost,  had 
given  her.  It  was  a  project  that  had  often  been  in  her 
thoughts;  at  first,  just  as  a  dream,  latterly,  as  a  realizable 
hope. 

Considered  just  as  a  visit  to  her  mother  and  sister,  the 
journey  to  California  was  a  success.  Her  mother,  especially, 
got  a  vast  satisfaction  out  of  the  twins,  and  Eose  herself  an 
equal  satisfaction  out  of  seeing  how  happy  and  content  sha 
was. 

She  was  writing  a  book — a  sort  of  autobiography.  Not  that 
her  life,  as  she  modestly  said,  was  worth  writing  about,  but 
that  the  progress  of  the  Cause  she  had  devoted  her  life  to 
could  hardly  be  illustrated  in  a  better  way  than  with  an  ac 
count  of  that  life ;  of  the  ideas  she  had  found  current  in  her 
girlhood ;  of  the  long  struggle  by  means  of  which  those  ideas 
had  become  modified;  and,  last  and  most  important,  of  the 
danger  lest,  now  that  the  old  fixed  ideas  had  become  fluid, 
they  should  flow  in  the  wrong  direction.  Portia  was  acting 
as  her  amanuensis — faithful,  competent,  devoted,  and  just  as 
of  old — or  perhaps  more  so,  Eose  couldn't  be  sure — ironic;  a 
little  acrid. 

Mrs.  Stanton's  attitude  toward  Eose's  own  adventure  per 
plexed  and  amused  her  a  little.  She'd  half  expected  to  be  em 
barrassed  with  approbation.  She  was  prepared  to  deprecate 
a  little  the  idea  that  by  the  example  of  her  revolt  and  her  at 
tained  independence  she  had  done  a  service  to  the  great  Cause. 
She  didn't  feel  at  all  sure  that  she  had ;  couldn't  believe  that 


570  THE   REAL   ADVENTURE 

she  and  Rodney,  with  all  their  struggles,  had  settled  any 
thing;  and  she  had  hesitated  as  to  how  far  she  could  convey 
that  doubt  to  her  mother. 

But  she  might  have  spared  her  pains.  Mrs.  Stanton's 
attitude,  while  it  fell  short  of  "the  less  said  the  better/'  was 
one,  at  least,  of  suspended  judgment.  She  couldn't,  con 
ceivably,  ever  have  left  Henry  Stanton.  She  couldn't,  evi 
dently,  understand  why  Rose  mightn't  have  done  her  wifely 
duty  and  been  content  with  that.  She  felt  it  incumbent  on 
women  to  demonstrate  to  men  that  the  new  liberties  they 
sought  would  not,  when  granted,  lead  them  to  disregard  the 
ties  that  were  the  essential  foundations  of  Christian  society. 
But  Rose  belonged  to  the  new  generation — a  generation  that 
confronted,  no  doubt,  new  problems,  and  would  have  to  solve 
them  for  itself. 

This  suited  Rose  well  enough.  What  she  wanted  from  her 
mother,  anyway,  was  just  the  old  look  of  love  and  trust  and 
confidence.  And  she  got  that  abundantly. 

The  thing  she  wanted  from  Portia  she  didn't  get.  As  long 
as  any  one  else  was  by — her  mother,  or  Miss  French  in  charge 
of  the  twins — she  and  Portia  chatted  easily,  on  the  best 
of  terms.  But,  left  alone  with  her — as  it  seemed  to  Rose  she 
actually  took  pains  not  to  be — Portia's  manner  took  on  that 
old  ironic  aloofness  that  had  always  silenced  her  when  she 
was  a  girl.  She  made  at  last  a  resolute  effort  to  break 
through. 

"One  of  the  things  I  came  out  for,"  she  said,  "was  to  talk 
to  you — talk  it  all  out  with  you.  I  want  to  know  what  sort 
of  job  you  think  I've  made  of  it." 

"You've  evidently  made  a  good  job  of  the  costume  busi 
ness,"  said  Portia.  "I  read  that  little  article  about  you  in 
Vanity  about  a  month  ago.  That  didn't  seem  to  leave  much 
doubt  as  to  who's  who." 

"I  don't  mean  that,"  said  Rose.  "I  mean  what  sort  of  job 
of  it  altogether;  of  the — of  the  life  that's  yours  as  well  as 
mine." 

She  stopped  there  and  waited,  but  all  the  assent  she  got 
from  Portia  was  that  she  forbore  to  change  the  subject.  They 


THE   BEGINNING  571 

were  sitting  in  the  study  which  her  mother  had  just  aban 
doned  for  her  afternoon  nap,  and  Portia  had  busied  her 
self  sorting  over  the  litter  of  papers  her  mother's  activities 
always  left. 

"I  want  to  tell  you  all  about  it,"  Eose  said.  "I'd  like  to 
tell  you  every  smallest  thing  about  it,  if  it  were  possible,  so 
that  you  could — remember  it  as  I  do." 

She  tried  to  do  this;  to  give  her  sister — not  a  narrative 
(her  letters,  after  all,  had  put  Portia  in  possession  of  the 
outlines  of  the  story) — but  at  least  an  interpretation  of  it  that 
would  go  to  the  bottom ;  things  she  couldn't  write  in  her  let 
ters,  the  actuating  desires  and  hopes  that  lay  behind  the  things 
she'd  done.  But  the  attempt  collapsed.  She  was  talking  in 
a  vacuum.  Her  phrases  grew  more  disjointed  until  she  felt 
that  they  were  meaningless.  At  least,  scrambling  back  to 
solid  ground  again,  she  told  Portia  that  she  wanted  to  pay 
back  to  her  the  cost  of  her  education,  as  well  as  that  could  be 
calculated,  and  of  her  trousseau. 

Portia's  negative  of  this  proposition  was  as  keen,  and 
straight  as  a  knife-edge.  The  thing  wasn't  to  be  discussed; 
not  to  be  considered  for  an  instant.  "We're  perfectly  well 
off,  mother  and  I.  We're  living  easily  within  our  income  out 
here,  and — we're  as  contented  as  possible."  The  cadence  of 
those  last  three  words  had  a  finality  about  it  that  closed  the 
subject. 

Portia  didn't  want  to  share,  vicariously,  in  the  life  she'd 
made  possible  for  Eose.  The  branch  had  withered  indeed  and 
didn't  want  the  pain  of  feeling  the  sap  struggling  up  under 
its  bark  again.  The  ashes  had  better  be  left  banked  up  about 
the  fading  coal.  The  silence  was  like  the  click  of  a  closing 
door.  Then  Portia  said : 

''What  does  the  North  Side  bunch  think  of  you  now  you've 
come  back?  And  those  Lake  Forest  friends  of  yours?  They 
must  have  been  hideously  scandalized.  Are  they  going  to 
forgive  you  ?" 

"Oh,  they're  lovely  to  me,"  said  Eose.  "The  only  one  I've 
lost  out  with  is  Frederica.  She'll  be  a  long  time  making  it 
up  with  me,  if  she  ever  does." 


572  THE    BEAL   ADVEXTUBE 

•'She  saw  what  Bodney  went  through  while  you  were  away, 
I  expect,"  Portia  suggested. 

"That,  of  course,"  said  Bose.  "And  then — well,  my  going 
away  like  that,  especially  as  she  began  to  see  what  the  idea 
was,  must  have  seemed  a  sort  of  criticism  on  her  own  way  of 
life,  which  she's  every  reason  to  feel  perfectly  satisfied  with. 
And  that,  after  she'd  let  herself  get  really  fond  of  me,  and 
had  brought  me  up  by  hand — which  is  what  she  did  that  first 
season,  must  be  pretty  hard  to  forgive.  She  has  forgiven  me, 
of  course.  She's  a  dear.  But  we've — sort  of  got  to  begin 
again." 

Portia  wanted  to  know  about  all  the  others:  that  pretty 
Williamson  woman,  and  a  few  more  whose  names  she  re 
membered. 

Bose  told  her;  showed  a  feverish  interest  in  the  rather 
indifferent  topic  just  to  bury  the  memory  of  the  one  that  had 
failed  so  dismally.  She  described  a  dinner  or  two  she  had 
been  to  since  her  return,  and  told  of  the  little  triumph  that 
had  been  made  for  her  on  the  occasion  of  the  Chicago  opening 
of  Come  On  In.  Everybody  had  been  there  and  the  Craw- 
fords  had  given  a  supper  dance  for  her  at  the  Blackstone 
afterward.  And  driving  in  the  last  nail,  she  told  of  the  feeble 
little  witticism  old  Mrs.  Crawford  had  made  apropos  of 
her  return — a  remark  whose  tinge  of  malice  was  so  mild  that 
it  was  felt  by  all  to  constitute  an  official  sanction  of  her  social 
rehabilitation. 

Portia  honestly  enjoyed  all  that,  but  Bose  went  back  to  the 
hotel  feeling  pretty  blue.  (They  were  stopping  at  the  hotel. 
The  twins  alone,  to  say  nothing  of  Miss  French  and  herself, 
would  have  been  too  much  for  the  modest  confines  of  the 
bungalow.)  She  wished  she  could  have  a  good  long  talk, 
to-night,  with  Bodney. 

She  had  a  sense  of  somebody,  away  up  above  all  mundane 
affairs — not  responsible  for  them,  perhaps,  but  capable,  at  all 
events,  of  thoroughly  taking  them  in — smiling  at  them  all 
with  a  sort  of  ferocious  cynicism.  In  the  foreground  of  this 
impression  were  the  good  friends — the  really  good  friends  she 
had  just  been  telling  Portia  about,  who  had  taken  her  back 


THE   BEGINNING  573 

with  so  warm  a  welcome — because  she'd  succeeded;  got  away 
with  it ! 

It  was  with  a  deeper  feeling  of  melancholy  that  she  thought 
of  Portia  and  her  mother.  Portia,  who  had  fought  so  gal 
lantly  and  deserved  so  much,  thwarted,  withered,  huddling 
her  ashes  around  her  so  that  her  coal  of  fire  might  never  be 
fanned  into  flame  again.  Her  mother,  living  gently  in  the 
afterglow  of  an  outworn  gospel.  Must  every  one  come 
to  an  end  like  that  when  some  initial  store  of  energy  was 
spent  ?  Begin  walling  himself  in  against  life  ?  Stuffing  new 
experiences  into  pigeonholes,  unscrutinized  ?  Would  the  time 
come  when  little  Portia  would  have  to  begin  treating  her  with 
the  same  tender — patronage  that  Eose  felt  now  for  her 
mother?  Would  little  Portia,  some  day,  smile  over  her  like 
that,  and  wonder  whether  she'd  ever — really  lived? 

She  did  wish  she  could  have  a  talk  with  Eodney. 

The  telephone  switchboard  in  the  lobby  gave  her  an  idea. 
It  was  five  o'clock,  now;  seven  in  Chicago.  He'd  just  be  sit 
ting  down  to  dinner,  all  by  himself,  poor  dear,  most  likely, 
and  wishing  for  a  talk  with  her.  Well,  why  not  ? 

She  rather  electrified  the  hotel  office  when  she  put  in  that 
call.  The  whole  place  wore  an  important  air  for  the  next 
half-hour.  She  went  up  to  her  room  to  wait  for  it,  and  before 
the  line  was  put  through  she  thought  of  something  that  would 
have  prevented  her  doing  it  if  she'd  thought  in  time.  He'd 
probably  think  something  horrible  had  happened  to  one  of 
them.  So  the  moment  she  heard  his  voice — it  was  faint  and 
far-away  but  clear  enough  that  she  could  detect  the  strain 
ing  urgency  of  it — she  said : 

"It's  all  right,  Eoddy.  There  isn't  a  thing  the  matter.  Did 
I  frighten  you  half  to  death  ?" 

He  said,  "Thank  God !"  And  then,  "I  don't  suppose  it  was 
two  minutes  I  waited  for  your  voice,  but  it  seemed  a  year. 
What  is  it?" 

"I'm  ashamed  to  tell  you,  after  a  scare  like  that.  It's  noth 
ing,  Eoddy.  Just  to  hear  you  say  hello.  It  seems  a  pretty 
unjust  sort  of  world,  to-night,  and  I  wanted  to  be  reminded 
that  you  were  in  it.  That's  all." 


574  THE    EEAL   ADVENTUEE 

She  had  to  say  it  all  over  again  before  she  could  make  him 
believe  he'd  heard  her  straight,  and  by  that  time  she  was 
feeling  pretty  foolish  over  the  impulse  she  had  yielded  to. 
But  just  the  sound  of  his  good  big  laugh,  when  he  understood, 
was  worth  it. 

"You  aren't  running  it,  you  know/'  he  told  her.  <rLeave 
the  worry  to  the  Authorities.  I  can't  philosophize  any  better 
than  that  at  twenty  dollars  a  minute.  I  wish  you  were  here/' 

"I  wish  so  too,"  she  said.  •  "I  will  be  next  week." 

When  she  had  hung  up  the  receiver,  she  had  to  squeeze 
the  tears  out  of  her  eyes  before  she  could  see  to  do  anything 
else.  But  it  was  with  her  own  smile  that  she  contemplated 
what  she  meant  to  do  next.  She  went  into  the  adjoining 
room,  relegated  Miss  French  to  the  side  lines  and  undressed 
the  twins  herself. 

The  twins  adored  her  and  had  the  most  ineffably  delicious 
ways  of  showing  it.  But  an  added  attraction  for  Eose  re 
sided  in  the  fact  that  this  incursion  of  hers  always — just  a 
little — annoyed  Miss  French.  Clever  as  the  nurse  was  about 
handling  the  twins,  she  could  not  manage  even  the  pretense 
to  that  professional  superiority  which  is  the  prerogative  of 
nurses  toward  mothers.  Eose,  with  those  highly  trained 
hands  of  hers,  a  twin  in  each  of  them,  could  exhibit  a  dazzling 
virtuosity  that  left  Miss  French  nowhere. 


THE  END 


23*37 


Bfct 


,.r.    SO.UJHER^  "EGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A     000676924     4 


